Why an unread source is never recorded as an absence

Public sources go down, rate-limit, change structure, and refuse automated readers. When that happens, GhostPost records the attempt and its outcome, and the posting's last known state is left unchanged.

Collapsing an unread source into a disappearance would be the single fastest way to make the record untrustworthy: it would manufacture events that never happened, at scale, on exactly the days a source was least cooperative.

So source readability is tracked as its own axis, separate from the three evidence states — Observed, Stated absent, and Can't determine. A reader can always see which sources were read and which were not.