Chart Integrity Note — Parasocial Streaming 100 — Edition 1 (6 July 2026)
Inaugural Edition · Monday, July 6, 2026
Published by Borealis, the data and measurement layer behind the Influence Index charts.
Summary
Ahead of publishing the inaugural Parasocial Streaming 100, one channel that would otherwise have appeared in the ranking — including at the top position — was excluded under the chart’s anti-manipulation and eligibility policy. The edition was then regenerated so that every remaining position recomputed from the underlying data. The published chart reflects that corrected edition.
We are noting this publicly, on day one, because the credibility of a chart rests on the integrity of what it excludes as much as what it ranks.
What the policy covers
The Parasocial Streaming 100 measures organic live-streaming by individual creators — real audiences watching real streams, aggregated across a creator’s linked channels over a Monday–Sunday tracking week. Two categories never rank:
- Non-creator channels — relays, rebroadcast loops, network and publisher feeds — which are not individual creators streaming.
- Channels whose audience signals fail eligibility review — where the viewership data is inconsistent with a genuine, organic live audience.
The exclusion in this edition falls under the second category.
What we found
Our automated review flagged concurrent-viewership patterns inconsistent with an organic live audience. In plain terms: a genuine audience rises and falls across the day — more viewers in peak hours, fewer overnight. The flagged channel’s audience did not vary across the daily cycle in the way real audiences do; it held nearly flat around the clock across the full week.
We are deliberately not publishing the precise detection thresholds (doing so would hand a roadmap to anyone trying to game the chart), and we are not characterizing the specific mechanism behind the anomaly. What our data supports is a clear, reproducible finding: the viewership signals do not meet the eligibility bar for a chart that measures organic live audiences.
What we did — and why you can trust the rest of the board
The correction was made the integrity-correct way, not by hand:
- Excluded at the data layer. The channel was flagged in an auditable exclusions record — with the finding, the decision, and a timestamp — not quietly struck from the chart.
- Regenerated, not edited. The full edition was recomputed by the same scoring engine that produces every edition, over the population with the channel removed. Every other creator’s score and rank re-derived from the underlying data — no position was moved by hand.
- Nothing was overwritten. The chart ledger is append-only. The original edition and the corrected edition both remain permanently on record; the published chart points to the corrected version. Any published number can be reconstructed.
The same anomaly detection runs against every channel, every week. This wasn’t a one-time check — it’s the standing integrity layer behind the chart.
Standing commitments
- Auditability. Every published number is reconstructible from retained data. Anomaly filtering applied to any creator in any week is logged so disputes are answerable.
- Corrections are versioned, never silent. If a published edition is corrected, the prior version is retained and the correction is recorded with a public note — like this one.
- Methodology first. The chart’s inputs and rules are published; the exact weights and detection thresholds are not, by design.
Questions or disputes about an eligibility decision can be directed to the Borealis integrity desk. This note accompanies the inaugural edition of the Parasocial Streaming 100, July 6, 2026.
Amendment — 30 July 2026
The standing commitment above reads: “Every published number is reconstructible from retained data.”
That claim was stronger than what we could deliver at the time, and we are correcting it rather than quietly restating it elsewhere.
A creator’s score depends on the field they were measured against — every other eligible creator observed that week. The positions, scores and figures we published are retained exactly as published, and every superseded version of a corrected edition is retained in full. But the field was not captured at publication. It was read live from a roster that changes daily, so recomputing an edition from this period today does not reproduce it exactly: the arithmetic is the same, the set it ran over is not.
We asserted reconstructibility before the mechanism that guarantees it existed. That mechanism exists from the edition of 3 August 2026, which freezes the full comparison set alongside the ranking, so editions from that date forward can be reconstructed exactly as published. Editions before it — including this one — cannot.
What is retained for this edition, and permanently:
- Every position and score exactly as published.
- Every superseded version of the edition, in full, with the date each was published.
- The eligibility decision described in this note, with its evidence.
The commitment for editions from 3 August 2026 onward is unchanged and now holds. For this edition, the honest statement is retention, not reconstruction.
Where to send a dispute or a question about this note: the Parasocial charts desk, at corrections@parasocialmagazine.com. What to send, and what happens to it, is set out on the methodology page.
The note above refers to “the Borealis integrity desk” and gives no way to reach it. That is the same desk under its former name — Borealis is the internal measurement layer behind the charts, and naming it to a reader explained nothing. Reader-facing copy now says the Parasocial charts desk.
The byline at the top of this note is wrong on both counts — it names Borealis, and it attributes this chart to the Influence Index, a separate property, when the note concerns the Parasocial Streaming 100.
This amendment corrects the note above. The original text is left intact rather than edited, because a note whose subject is not correcting things silently should not be corrected silently.
