Ref T12685. I provided this incorrect (return new rather than throw) implementation earlier; it can now be replaced with a proper implementation.
This caused application policy edits to spew this into the daemon log:
[2017-05-14 15:35:27] EXCEPTION: (Error) Call to undefined method PhutilMethodNotImplementedException::setActor() at [<phabricator>/src/applications/transactions/worker/PhabricatorApplicationTransactionPublishWorker.php:69]