Registered Reports avoid the ‘file-drawer problem’, in which negative or inconclusive results never see the light of day. Credit: Getty Do algorithms used by social-media platforms amplify posts that are emotive, toxic, political or perceived as moralizing? And, if they do, does that affect how users see their social world? William Brady, a social psychologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and his colleagues wanted to test these questions during the 2024 US presidential election. To maximize their study’s rigour, they did something rare in science publishing 1 : they submitted their topic and research plan for peer review before they had gathered a single data point. Read the paper: Redesigning algorithms to intervene on social norm misperceptions during a national election The resulting Registered Report is the first completed study 2 of this kind published in Nature since we began inviting them in 2023 .…