Streisand effect
The Streisand effect is a social phenomenon that occurs when an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information has the unintended consequence of further publicizing that information, often via the Internet. It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose attempt to suppress the California Coastal Records Project's photograph of her residence in Malibu, California, taken to document California coastal erosion, inadvertently drew further attention to it in 2003.[1]
Attempts to suppress information are often made through cease-and-desist letters, but instead of being suppressed, the information receives extensive publicity, as well as media extensions such as videos and spoof songs, which can be mirrored on the Internet or distributed on file-sharing networks.[2][3]
In politics
In November 2007, Tunisia blocked access to YouTube and Dailymotion after material was posted depicting Tunisian political prisoners. Activists and their supporters then started to link the location of then-President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's palace on Google Earth to videos about civil liberties in general. The Economist said this "turned a low-key human-rights story into a fashionable global campaign".[18]
The French intelligence agency DCRI's deletion of the French-language Wikipedia article about the military radio station of Pierre-sur-Haute[19] resulted in the article temporarily becoming the most-viewed page on the French Wikipedia.[20]
A 2013 libel suit by Theodore Katsanevas against a Greek Wikipedia editor resulted in members of the project bringing the story to the attention of journalists.[21]
The government of South Africa stated their intention to ban the 2017 book The President's Keepers, detailing corruption within the government of then-President Jacob Zuma. This caused sales of the book to spike dramatically, causing the book to sell out within 24 hours before the ban would supposedly be put into effect.[22][23] This made the book a national best seller and led to multiple reprints.
In February 2018, Anne Applebaum wrote in The Washington Post about the Polish Holocaust law, which would have criminalized blaming Poles for the Holocaust. She argued that the Streisand effect would draw more attention to aspects of history that the Polish government preferred to suppress.[24]
A 2018 study of millions of individual responses of Chinese social media users found that sudden censorship of information by the Chinese government and its affiliates often led to mass backlashes, including newfound popularity of VPNs and the subsequent reviewing of entire topic lists on which censored subjects appear.[25] Other researchers found that the backlash tended to result in permanent changes to political attitudes and behaviors.[26]
A 2019 study of political imprisonment by the government of Saudi Arabia found that while the incarceration tended to deter individual dissidents from further dissent, it strongly emboldened their social media followers, led to a sharp increase in calls for political reform, and resulted in an increase in online dissent and physical in-person protests overall, including criticism of the ruling family and calls for regime change.[27] Such repression draws public attention to the imprisoned dissidents and their causes, and did not deter other prominent figures in Saudi Arabia from continuing to dissent online.[28]
In March 2019, California Representative Devin Nunes filed a defamation lawsuit against Twitter and three users for US$250 million in damages. One user named in the lawsuit, the parody account DevinCow (Name: Devin Nunes' cow), had 1,200 followers before the lawsuit. The number of followers of DevinCow soon jumped to 600,000.[29]
In August 2020, it was reported that the Chinese government had blanked out parts of its Baidu mapping platform, and that this could be used to find a network of buildings bearing hallmarks of prisons and internment camps.[30]
In October 2020, the New York Post published emails purporting to be from a laptop owned by Presidential candidate Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden, detailing an alleged corruption scheme.[31] In response, Twitter blocked the story from their platform and locked the accounts of those who shared a link to the article, including the New York Post's own Twitter account, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, among others. Researchers at MIT cited the increase of 5.5 thousand shares every 15 minutes to about 10 thousand shares shortly after Twitter censored the story as evidence of the Streisand Effect nearly doubling the attention the story received.[32]