Signals Policy
The Massachusetts Times · Published by The Massachusetts Times Company · massachusettstimes.us/policies/signals · Effective October 16, 2026
This policy states how The Massachusetts Times speaks to machines — where our machine-readable signals live, what they mean, and the honesty they are held to in both directions. Every sentence here is kept today.
1. The Principle
1.1. We speak to machines in the open, through standard channels, and what we say there binds: the Machine Terms make our signals part of the terms themselves, and this policy is how the signals are kept — honest, current, and consistent with the published pages.
1.2. A publication that writes one law for people and mutters another to machines has two characters. We keep one.
2. The Channels
2.1. Our signals live where machines already look: the robots exclusion file at its standard address on every publication, page-level directives where a page needs its own voice, response headers where the protocol speaks, and the Machine Terms at massachusettstimes.us/terms/machine as the master instrument every signal serves.
2.2. The signal law is uniform across this publication and the infrastructural apparatus it shares: one doctrine, spoken identically at every host, so no machine can forum-shop among our mastheads.
3. The Grammar of Consent
3.1. An allowance in our signals opens exactly the lane the Machine Terms open, on that lane's conditions — never more.
3.2. A disallowance means no.
3.3. Absence means absence: a path, a lane, or a use our signals do not address carries no permission beyond the Machine Terms' free lanes. Silence grants nothing, and where a signal and a page could be read to differ, the narrower permission governs.
4. Honesty of Signals
4.1. We do not cloak. The page a declared crawler is shown is the page a reader is shown — same content, same corrections, same labels. We do not serve flattery to indexes and something else to people.
4.2. Our signals never lie for advantage: no markup asserting what a page is not, no structured data dressing opinion as news or rendering as record — the Editorial and Provenance Policies' labels carry into every machine-facing channel intact.
4.3. Signal changes are dated and kept like policy changes, so an operator can establish what our signals said on the day its systems visited.
5. The Reciprocity Rule
5.1. We hold ourselves to the conduct we demand. When systems of ours gather from the public web in service of our journalism, they identify themselves truthfully, honor the signals and rate limits of the sites they visit, and never evade a wall — a refusal is a refusal, routed to a human judgment, not to a workaround.
5.2. What we call a violation when aimed at our record, we call a violation when any hand of ours could aim it outward. The Attribution Policy carries this law for credit; this section carries it for conduct.
6. Emerging Standards
6.1. Machine-permission standards are young and moving. As standards emerge that express our terms more precisely — content-use declarations, training-permission signals, provenance marks — we adopt and publish the ones that serve the record, in these same channels.
6.2. No emerging signal's ambiguity loosens anything: the Machine Terms remain the authoritative instrument, and every new signal is an additional voice for the same law.
7. Never Aimed at People
7.1. Signals and defenses aimed at machines never gate a person. Assistive technology is a reader here, as the Accessibility Terms state, and a signal regime that costs a disabled reader the record is a defect to repair, not a policy to defend.
8. Check Us
8.1. Our signals are public by nature — the robots file is one address away, and this page is its law. A mismatch between what our signals say and what this library says is a defect, reportable through the publication's published contact channels and handled under the Correction Terms.
9. The Record of This Policy
9.1. This policy is kept in dated versions at its address, so what our signals promised and demanded on any given day can always be checked.
This policy is one of the Policies this publication keeps.