What Counts as Publishing?

Publishing is deciding what reaches people.

Not writing. Not printing. Deciding. The word sounds like it belongs to newspapers and book houses, but the act was always the decision: this goes out, this doesn't, this goes first, this goes everywhere. Even “anything goes — our users can publish through our site” is that decision. Whoever makes that decision is publishing.

Which means the category is bigger than it sounds. If your URL creates content — by hand, by a newsroom, or by AI — you're publishing. If it commissions content, you're publishing. And if it gives people the tools to post, and your systems decide what gets surfaced, ranked, recommended, or removed, you're publishing at a scale no newsroom ever touched. A newspaper publishes its letters page, even though readers wrote the letters. A platform publishes its feed, even though users wrote the posts.

Didn't the law settle that platforms aren't publishers?

It settled something narrower, and the story is worth two minutes.

In 1991, a court looked at CompuServe, an early online service that hosted forums and left them alone, and treated it like a bookstore: not answerable for what's on the shelves unless it knew, or had reason to know. In 1995, another court looked at Prodigy, which had promised families a moderated network and deleted what it could catch. Because Prodigy exercised judgment, the court called it a publisher — and made it answerable for everything it missed.

Care created liability. Neglect created safety. Congress ended that absurdity in 1996 with Section 230: a platform can't be treated as the publisher of what its users post, and moderating in good faith doesn't change that. Whatever you think of that law, notice what it actually is: a rule about who pays for other people's words. It has never said that deciding what reaches people isn't publishing. It built a liability shield, not a definition.

In 2024, the question reached the Supreme Court from the other direction. The platforms argued that arranging a feed is editorial judgment — the same protected judgment a newspaper exercises over its front page — and a majority of the Court agreed, at least for the classic curated feed (Moody v. NetChoice). Editorial judgment, in other words, is settled. The other half of the editor's tradition — standards, stated in public, that readers can hold you to — is still open. No law requires it. None forbids it.

The one thing no shield ever covered

Section 230 protects platforms from other people's content. Nothing protects anyone from their own promises, and nothing should. Courts have let broken-promise claims proceed where every other theory was blocked (Barnes v. Yahoo, 2009). And the privacy policy — the document this convention rhymes with — became meaningful before any dedicated privacy-policy law existed: regulators simply treated breaking your own posted policy as deceiving the public.

Your word is the oldest instrument of accountability there is, and it's the one instrument that was never taken off the table. A publishing policy puts it on the record.

So what should your policy say?

That's yours to decide. That's the point. A publishing policy is custom to you, the way a privacy policy is: your standards, written in your words. It might cover the content you create. It might cover the content others publish through your site, and where your lines are. It might say what you'll do when you fall short of it. Ambitious or modest, four paragraphs or forty. There is one rule, and it's procedural: whatever you say, be as good as it.

And to be plain about what this is not: publishing a policy doesn't change how Section 230 treats you — the law turns on what a service does, not what it calls itself — and it waives no one else's protections. What it changes is what the public can expect of you, because you told them, on a public record. Whatever weight your promises carry is the weight promises have always carried; that was never the shield's to give or take.

If the definition includes you — and if your URL puts content in front of people, it does — publish your word. If you're a reader, look up an organization and see whether they've put theirs on the record. Ours is here. Hold us to it.

The law decided who pays for other people's words. What yours are worth was always yours to prove.

This page is a definition and a history, not legal advice. How any of it applies to you is a question for a lawyer, not a webpage.