Streisand effect

The Streisand effect is a primarily online phenomenon in which an attempt to hide or remove a piece of information has the perverse effect of publicizing the information more widely. It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose attempt in 2003 to suppress photographs of her residence inadvertently generated further publicity.

Similar attempts have been made, for example, in cease-and-desist letters, to suppress numbers, files and websites. Instead of being suppressed, the information receives extensive publicity and media extensions such as videos & spoof songs, often being widely mirrored across the Internet or distributed on file-sharing networks.^[1][2]

Mike Masnick of Techdirt coined the term after Streisand, citing privacy violations, unsuccessfully sued photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com for US$50 million in an attempt to have an aerial photograph of her mansion removed from the publicly available collection of 12,000 California coastline photographs.^[1][3][4] Adelman said that he was photographing beachfront property to document coastal erosion as part of the government sanctioned and commissioned California Coastal Records Project.^[5] As a result of the case, public knowledge of the picture increased substantially; more than 420,000 people visited the site over the following month.^[6]

Examples

• In April 2007, an attempt at blocking an AACS key from being disseminated on Digg caused an uproar when cease-and-desist letters demanded the code be removed from several high-profile websites. This led to the key's proliferation across other sites and chat rooms in various formats, with one commentator describing it as having become "the most famous number on the internet". Within a month, the key had been reprinted on over 280,000 pages, printed on T-shirts and tattoos, and had appeared on YouTube in a song played over 45,000 times.^[7]
• In November 2007, Tunisia blocked access to YouTube and DailyMotion after material was posted of 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".^[8]
• In January 2008, The Church of Scientology's unsuccessful attempts to get Internet websites to delete a video of Tom Cruise speaking about Scientology resulted in the creation of Project Chanology.^[9][10][11]
• In 2008, the Pirate Bay was asked to censor a link to a famous Swedish murder case and evidence that circulated on the BitTorrent search site. Peter Sunde, the Pirate Bay's spokesman said that removal would only increase public interest, according to the Streisand effect, and thus keeping the links served everybody's interest.^[12]
• On 5 December 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) added the Wikipedia article about the 1976 Scorpions album Virgin Killer to a child pornography blacklist, considering the album's cover art "a potentially illegal indecent image of a child under the age of 18".^[9][13] The article quickly became one of the most popular pages on the site,^[14] and the publicity surrounding the censorship resulted in the image being spread across other sites.^[15] The IWF were later reported on the BBC News website to have said "IWF's overriding objective is to minimise the availability of indecent images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect".^[16] This effect was also noted by the IWF in their statement about the removal of the URL from the blacklist.^[17][18]
• In September 2009, multi-national oil company Trafigura obtained a super-injunction against The Guardian newspaper, preventing them from reporting on an internal Trafigura investigation into the 2006 Côte d'Ivoire toxic waste dump scandal, and also from reporting on even the existence of the injunction. Utilising Parliamentary privilege, Labour MP Paul Farrelly referred to the super-injunction in a parliamentary question, and on October 12, 2009, The Guardian reported that they had been gagged from reporting parliament, in violation of the 1688 Bill of Rights.^[19][20] Blogger Richard Wilson correctly identified the blocked question as referring to the Trafigura waste dump scandal, after which The Spectator suggested the same. Not long after, Trafigura began trending on Twitter, helped along by Stephen Fry retweeting the story to his followers.^[21] Twitter users soon tracked down all details of the case, and by October 16, the super-injunction had been lifted and the report published.^[22]
• In December 2010, the website WikiLeaks was the subject of DoS attacks and rejection from ISPs as a consequence of the United States cable leaks. People sympathetic to WikiLeaks' cause voluntarily mirrored the website in order to make it impossible for any one person to completely remove the cables.^[23]
• In May 2011, Premier League footballer Ryan Giggs sued Twitter after a user revealed that he was the subject of an anonymised privacy injunction (informally referred to as a "super-injunction"^[24]) that prevented the publication of details regarding an alleged affair with model and former Big Brother contestant Imogen Thomas. A blogger for the Forbes website observed that the British media, who were banned from breaking the terms of the injunction, had mocked the footballer for not understanding the effect.^[25] The Guardian subsequently posted a graph detailing—without naming the player—the number of references to the player's name against time, showing a large spike following the news that the player was seeking legal action.^[26]

See also

• Banned in Boston
• Blowback (intelligence)
• CTB v News Group Newspapers
• DeCSS
• Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority v. Anderson
• Slashdot effect
• Superinjunction

References

External links

• Streisand Effect on TV Tropes