Did the correction actually arrive?
Protocol summary · discussion draft · 9 October 2026. Not frozen, not a registered protocol, and no results reported. Design choices below require agreement before data collection.
Claim and comparison
Does actively routing a correction to the original audience improve verified receipt over publishing a correction on a page?
Proposed pilot
Use consented participants and harmless simulated errors, followed by a full debrief. Randomly assign a page-only correction or a direct correction carrying the same evidence. Define the original-exposure group before assignment and report delivery, opening and comprehension separately.
Measures and failure condition
Primary candidate: the share of original recipients who correctly identify the correction at a fixed follow-up time. Also measure recall, burden and unwanted-message effects. If a precise estimate excludes a prespecified useful improvement, the delivery claim fails in this setting; opening a message alone is not correction.
Before recruitment
Freeze follow-up timing, minimum useful effect, sample size, missing-data handling, consent text and an independent scoring rubric. Protect participant contact details and define deletion timing.
Control, challenge and stopping
Organizers choose tasks and control records, so their choices can bias the result. Preserve disagreements and protocol changes. Unresolved consent problems, data leakage or compromised scoring should pause the pilot. A negative result must remain reportable. Independent review arrangements and a successor operator are still to be agreed.
Challenge this protocol