/mal-PUB-lish/ (verb)
“To publish in a manner that violates a publishing policy you operate under.”
Publishing malpractice. The standards you broke are your own, or those of a community you chose to publish in.
Publishing failures cause real harm. When publishers break the standards they publish under, the consequences ripple through society:
These harms don't exist in isolation. They share a common root cause: publishing malpractice ("malpublishing").
You've heard of plagiarism, deepfakes, clickbait, fabrication, and fake news. These are specific publishing failures. Malpublishing is the umbrella term that encompasses them all.
Just as “malpractice” covers many specific medical failures, “malpublishing” covers many specific publishing failures—when they violate a policy the publisher operates under.
So nothing on that list is malpublishing everywhere. A deepfake published without disclosure is malpublishing wherever a policy required the disclosure, and not where none did. Each community sets its own standards. This page does not set them, and neither does anyone else.
This is why publishing policies matter—they make standards explicit.
Your community does—but “community” isn't a single entity.
It's the layered stack of publishing policies you operate under. A policy reaches you by one of three routes, and every one of them is declared in public, by someone who is on the record themselves. That is why nobody has to rule on whether a policy applies to you.
Your organization published its standards, so your organization is held to them. The failure is yours even when the keystrokes were an intern’s—the promise was made in your name, and "a staffer did it" was never a defense.
An attorney is held to her state bar’s advertising standards because she swore in. Nobody imposed them on her from outside; membership is the promise. This kind travels with you—the bar’s standards reach her firm’s website, her posts, her billboard. The bar publishes its policy, and is held to it in turn.
A student in a university journal. A user on a platform. This kind does not travel: it governs what you publish there and stops at that surface’s edge. A platform’s policy has nothing to say about your newsletter. The policy has to be public before you publish, and you are held to the version that was public then—never one written afterward. A surface that applies its policy to one person and waives it for another is breaking its own word.
The last two are different, and the difference is reach. A policy you joined travels with you. A policy of the place you publish stops at its edge. They stack: an attorney posting on a platform operates under both at once, and can malpublish against either.
A policy is a layer you can malpublish against only when all three of these hold:
Nobody joined the law, and no legislature is held to its own press regulation. So the law never tells you what your standards are. Malpublishing is measured against the policies you operate under, never against a statute—which is why it means the same thing in California, in Texas, and in Lagos.
What the law has always done is take promises seriously. The privacy policy—the document this convention rhymes with—became meaningful long before any privacy-policy law existed: regulators simply treated breaking your own posted policy as deceiving the public. Publishing a policy hands nobody new power over you. It puts your word somewhere it can be read, and whatever weight your promises carry is the weight promises have always carried.
The same action can be malpublishing in one context and unremarkable in another. Consider these scenarios:
A news outlet's standards require disclosure of any AI-generated visuals—publishing without it is malpublishing. A meme community, where AI manipulation is expected and contextually obvious, may have no such requirement.
A newspaper's policy separates its reporting from advertising, so running an advertiser's copy as reporting is malpublishing there. An independent creator whose policy promises only that paid posts are labeled has promised something different, and is held to that instead.
A platform's policy governs both. A user who publishes through it in violation of the standards that were posted before they posted has malpublished. So has the platform, if it applied those standards to one user and waived them for another—it promised, in public, to do otherwise. The record cuts both ways.
This is why making your publishing policy explicit matters—it says what you can be held to.
None of these is malpublishing everywhere, and this page is not the one deciding. Each is malpublishing wherever a policy you operate under ruled it out—and unremarkable where none did. They are listed because they are what policies most often address.
Two things are worth stating plainly, because they are what the word is most often stretched to cover:
Disagreeing with someone is not malpublishing. Opinions, theories, satire and fiction are not failures. A clearly marked opinion piece breaks no promise. Presenting fiction as fact breaks a promise wherever one was made about it.
An honest mistake is not malpublishing. What matters is intent and response. A mistake caught and corrected promptly and in public is just publishing. Knowing about a problem and leaving it standing is what turns it.
And malpublishing is never a verdict on whether something is true. It is a comparison between what a publisher said they would do and what they did. Readers can run that comparison themselves, which is the whole point—no one needs to be trusted to run it for them.
Note: standards differ, so the same act lands differently. Academic publishing may treat as malpublishing what a personal newsletter never promised anything about.
Mistakes happen. Forgetting to cite a source or publishing an error isn't automatically malpublishing—it becomes malpublishing when you learn of the problem and don't fix it promptly and visibly. What matters is intent and response. None of the commitments below is required of you. They appear here because they are the ones readers most often look for:
Be transparent about what the content is—news, opinion, satire, sponsored, AI-generated. Don't deceive audiences about intent.
State what you know, not more. Don't present speculation as fact or certainty you don't have.
Credit where information comes from. Let readers verify claims themselves.
When you learn something is wrong, fix it quickly and visibly. Leaving a known error standing is how an honest mistake turns into malpublishing.
Honor intellectual property, privacy, and human dignity. Get permission when required.
Ready to go deeper? Write a publishing policy in your own words.
The term combines the prefix “mal-” (meaning bad or wrongful) with “publish.” This follows established patterns like malpractice and malfunction. It addresses a linguistic gap—naming the root cause of information harms rather than just describing their effects.
In 2023, I observed a pattern: we had dozens of words for specific publishing failures—plagiarism, clickbait, deepfakes, fake news—but no umbrella term for the root cause. We named the symptoms but not the disease.
This linguistic gap matters. Without a shared term for publishing malpractice, we struggle to discuss it, legislate it, or hold it accountable. We talk past each other using different words for the same problem.
“Malpublishing” is my attempt to fill that gap. It's an act of free speech advocating for more responsible speech—naming the harm so we can address it.
I offer this term to the world—and publish it here to give the concept a clear, stable definition. If it helps communities define their standards and hold publishers accountable, it will have served its purpose.
— Roarke Clinton, March 2023
This site defines the failure. PublishingPolicy.org keeps the record—the policies themselves, every version, public, so anyone can check a publisher against their own word.
Free at publishingpolicy.org