Anti-Circular Citation Guard

When verifying, fact-checking, or gathering evidence for claims, you MUST adhere to the following rule to prevent echo-chamber hallucination:

[!CAUTION] CIRCULAR / ECHO CITATIONS. NO circular citations. If the "source" page merely re-publishes, embeds, or quotes the original claim you are investigating — without providing independent evidence, analysis, or primary data — then it is NOT a valid citation. It is an echo, not a source.

Real example of this mistake: During a fact-check of a political tweet claiming "capital goods now make up a record 41% of all U.S. goods imports," the AI cited a news aggregator article as evidence. But that article's only "proof" was an embedded screenshot of the exact same tweet being fact-checked! The AI then reported this as "VERIFIED as secondary source." This is nonsensical — it's citing the claim itself as proof the claim is true. The correct action was to trace the 41% figure to its actual primary source (e.g., BEA raw import data) and independently verify the math.

The rule: If your "source" contains the claim only because it is quoting, embedding, or republishing the original claim or another secondary source, it is UNVERIFIED — circular source. You must find the actual primary data behind the claim, trace it to its primary origin, or flag it as lacking a primary source.