The Streisand effect is the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide or remove a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the internet. The term is a modern expression of the older phenomenon that banning or censoring something often makes that item or information more desirable, and leads to it being actively sought out to a greater extent than it would have otherwise been.

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 and 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 unsuccessfully sued photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com for violation of privacy. The US$50 million lawsuit endeavored to remove an aerial photograph of Streisand's mansion from the publicly available collection of 12,000 California coastline photographs.^[1][3][4] Adelman maintained that he had photographed beachfront property to document coastal erosion as part of the government sanctioned and commissioned California Coastal Records Project.^[5][6] Before Streisand filed her lawsuit, "Image 3850" had been downloaded from Adelman's website only six times; two of those downloads were by Streisand's attorneys.^[7] 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.^[8]

Examples

• In April 2007, an attempt at blocking an Advanced Access Content System (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.^[9]
• 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".^[10]
• 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.^[11][12][13]
• In 2008, the Pirate Bay was asked to censor a link to autopsy photos of two murdered children from a famous Swedish murder case. 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.^[14]
• 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".^[11] The article quickly became one of the most popular pages on the site,^[15] and the publicity surrounding the censorship resulted in the image being spread across other sites.^[16] 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".^[17] This effect was also noted by the IWF in their statement about the removal of the URL from the blacklist.^[18][19]
• 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.^[20]
• In June 2012, Argyll and Bute council banned a nine-year-old primary school pupil from updating her blog with photos of lunchtime meals served in the school's canteen. The blog, which was already popular, started receiving an immense amount of views due to the international media furor that followed the ban. Within days the council reversed their decision under immense public pressure and scrutiny. After the reversal of the ban, the blog is now far more popular than it was before.^[21]
• On October 12, 2012, the Mesquite, Texas police department arrested and charged a woman with retaliation for posting the photo of an undercover police officer on her Facebook page asking “"Undercover Mesquite Narcotics . . . Anyone know this bitch?”^[22] She also printed up stacks of fliers for posting on street corners. The photograph of the officer was found on the officer's publically available Facebook page and was reposted by the woman on her own Facebook page. Within days 4Chan and Reddit forums have been filled with people posting the personal details of Mesquite police officers and other Dallas-area officers' information in a game of one-upmanship.

See also

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

References