I think semantics are important here, especially in a technical context. There are several way to "unpublish" an article: - Retract it - Delete it - Complet

I think semantics are important here, especially in a technical context. There are several way to "unpublish" an article: - Retract it - Delete it - Completely erase it from the web What BuzzFeed did in at least two cases was delete the articles and include them in their robots.txt, which, at least to me, is completely bonkers. It is one thing for a publication to retract an article, but it is an entirely different thing to make an effort of making it seem as if they never existed to begin with. It's that kind of mentality that leads you to think that even BuzzFeed don't think highly of their own articles, where you can always make it up in volume.