This is a list of notable incidents that have experienced a Streisand effect, an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove, or censor information, where the effort instead backfires by increasing public awareness of the information. This list includes only instances explicitly identified by the media or other sources as examples of the Streisand effect.
In March 2022, incumbent Australian federal MP Tim Wilson, in what had previously been considered to be the safe seat of Goldstein, drew national attention to his independent challenger Zoe Daniel when he made legal objections to posting of campaign signs by volunteers on the fences of private residences. [1] This also led to a significant increase in donations to the Daniel campaign. [2] [ better source needed ]
In May 2024, Australia's richest billionaire Gina Rinehart demanded that the National Gallery of Australia remove an unflattering caricature of herself painted by Aboriginal Australian artist Vincent Namatjira. Rinehart pressured 20 Australian swimmers she was sponsoring to lobby for the removal. Her actions was covered by many news outlets and brought new audiences to Namatjira's art. [3]
In December 2023, the Canadian Armed Forces at CFB Kingston sent a base wide email addressing a sex worker advertising on base. The worker, who was essentially unknown to most soldiers at the time, became instantly recognizable as the email advertised the woman and her services to the entire base. This situation was compounded after the story appeared in a number of national news outlets. [4]
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 virtual private networks and the subsequent reviewing of entire topic lists on which censored subjects appear. [5] Other researchers found that the backlash tended to result in permanent changes to political attitudes and behaviors. [6]
In August 2020, it was reported that the Chinese government had blanked out parts of Baidu's mapping platform, and that this could be used to find a network of buildings bearing hallmarks of prisons and internment camps. [7]
On June 3, 2022, Chinese streamer Li Jiaqi was interrupted for showing a tank-shaped ice cream in the livestream and failed to show up for the next scheduled show. This sudden suspension drew more attention to the sensitivity of the tank symbol, alluding to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre. [8]
In January 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic in China, the Jyllands-Posten newspaper received international attention when it published a cartoon depicting the Chinese flag with yellow virus-like figures instead of the usual yellow stars. [9] [10] The illustrator received numerous threats, and social media platforms were flooded by illustrations of the Danish flag that had been edited to included feces, texts like alle jeres familier døde ("all your families are dead") and similar mockery in what experts regarded as a coordinated action, much of it spread by newly started profiles that appeared to be automated. [11] [12] [13] The Chinese embassy in Denmark demanded an official apology from Jyllands-Posten. [14] Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen refused to apologize on behalf of the Danish government, declaring that there is freedom of speech in Denmark. [15] Other Danish newspapers, although some of them regarded the illustration as impolite, supported Jyllands-Posten, noting that Danish newspapers operate under Danish law, not based on intimidation from a non-democratic country, and also pointed out that few would have seen the illustration if not for the actions of the Chinese embassy. [10]
When Hong Kong's secretary for justice filed an injunction to bar the distribution of pro-democracy protest song Glory to Hong Kong with the intention to incite secession, sedition, or to violate the national anthem law, Senior Counsel Abraham Chan said the government's injunction application "would bring about an own goal" by amplifying that which it sought to prohibit. Chan cited "empirical evidence" that after the government announced that it would apply for a ban, "the level of engagement with the song increased". [16]
When Liu Xiaobo was awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize for "his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China", the Chinese Communist Party censored the news domestically, while publicly denouncing the Nobel Prize internationally. Most Western democracies, however, publicly praised the award and attended the awards ceremony despite pressure from Chinese diplomats. [17] [18]
When tennis star Peng Shuai disappeared after accusing Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli of raping her, the Chinese Communist Party's censorship of her story and subsequent staged public appearances of Peng drew increased worldwide scrutiny to her whereabouts and safety. [19] [20]
The French intelligence agency DCRI's attempt to delete the French Wikipedia article about the military radio station of Pierre-sur-Haute resulted in the restored article temporarily becoming the most-viewed page on the French Wikipedia. [21]
A 2013 libel suit by Greek politician Theodore Katsanevas against a Greek Wikipedia editor resulted in members of the project bringing the story to the attention of journalists. [22]
In 2020 Ákos Radnóti , a politician of Fidesz and then deputy mayor of Győr sued a resident of his city, identified only as Zoltán B., for a Facebook comment posted on a friend's personal profile page. In July 2020 one of B's friends shared a blog post accusing Radnóti of voter solicitation, under which B. commented "pay no attention to him, he's a dick". The deputy mayor sued B. for defamation, and B. was sentenced to three years of probation. [23] [24]
The case received wide media attention, in part because Radnóti's party has a poor reputation in the areas of free speech and other human rights, [25] in part because the politician's lawyer was the same Zoltán Rákosfalvy who defended ex-mayor Zsolt Borkai during his sex and corruption scandal in the preceding year, [24] and in part because B's sentence was seen as comparatively harsh (the trial happened the same month in which ex-diplomat Gábor Kaleta was sentenced to one year of probation and a monetary fine for owning thousands of child pornography photographs [26] ). Radnóti, who had previously been unknown outside his city, was widely criticised for being too sensitive and vindictive, and the outcome met disapproval from the general public, since politicians are public officials who are generally expected to endure criticism. [27] Radnóti and the case was widely parodied online, [28] with one popular blogger commenting that "he is more like a pussy" and paraphrasing a scene from Kafka's The Metamorphosis, with Radnóti being transformed into a penis. [29] His Wikipedia page has been vandalized several times, with his profession being stated as "dick". [30] A widespread joke stated that B. was in fact sentenced for releasing classified information.
B. appealed the sentence. As during the previous trial, he was defended by a lawyer of the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, while Radnóti represented himself this time, to avoid further association with Rákosfalvy. [31] In January 2021 B. was acquitted on the basis that the politician received the insult as a consequence of his acts as a public official, thus he has to endure criticism. [31] [32]
In February 2023, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India sought to ban India: The Modi Question , a BBC documentary that was critical of him. [33] This led to students in colleges across India screening the documentary on their own, [34] on campus and elsewhere.
In May 2009, the Israeli right-wing nationalist political party Yisrael Beiteinu introduced a bill that would outlaw all commemorations of the expulsion of Palestinians following the Independence War, known as "Nakba", with a three-year prison sentence for such acts of remembrance. [35] [36] The original bill did not pass, and the controversy surrounding it unintentionally promoted knowledge of the Nakba within Israeli society. [37] [38] [39]
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. [40] The legislation is part of the historical policy of the Law and Justice party which seeks to present a narrative of ethnic Poles exclusively as victims and heroes. [41] [42] [43] The law was met with widespread international criticism, as it was seen as an infringement on freedom of expression and on academic freedom, and as a barrier to open discussion on Polish collaborationism, [41] [44] [45] in what has been described as "the biggest diplomatic crisis in [Poland's] recent history". [46]
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. [47] 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. [48]
In 2017, the government of South Africa stated their intention to ban a book by Jacques Pauw, The President's Keepers , detailing corruption within the government of then-President Jacob Zuma. This resulted in sales of the book skyrocketing, and it sold out within 24 hours before the ban was to be put into effect. [49] [50] The book became a national best seller and led to multiple reprints. [51] This effect was repeated when Pauw published Our Poisoned Land (2023) and the Economic Freedom Fighters took legal action in an effort to ban the book, thereby resulting in an increase in book sales. [52] [53]
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 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". [54]
In March 2019, US Representative (Calif.) 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. After the suit, however, @DevinCow had gained some 600,000 additional followers. [55]
In October 2020, the New York Post published emails from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, detailing an alleged corruption scheme. [56] After internal discussion that debated whether the story may have originated from Russian misinformation and propaganda, 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, and White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, among others. [57] Researchers at MIT cited the increase of 5,500 shares every 15 minutes to about 10,000 shares shortly after Twitter censored the story, as evidence of the Streisand effect nearly doubling the attention the story received. [58] Twitter removed the ban the following day.
In June 2023, the city of Durham, North Carolina, sent a letter to Wikimedia Foundation seeking to determine the identities of three users who posted "accurate but unfavorable" [59] information on the Wikipedia pages of Mayor Elaine O'Neal and city council members DeDreana Freeman and Monique Holsey-Hyman. The day after Indy Week published an article [59] about the letter, traffic to the trio's Wikipedia pages increased by 50 to 70 times what it was the day before the article. [60]
Around the time that American politician JD Vance was nominated as the 2024 Republican vice presidential candidate, a July 15, 2024 Twitter post falsely said that Vance's memoir Hillbilly Elegy described him masturbating using a latex glove placed between couch cushions, leading to the creation of several Internet memes. This transparently false Internet hoax gained enough virality that the Associated Press published a fact check on July 24 to debunk it, but the agency removed the fact check from its website the next day saying it had not gone through the agency's "standard editing process". The removal itself became a news item and was described by The Daily Telegraph as an example of the Streisand effect. [61]
On June 18, 2022, The Times reported claims that Boris Johnson had tried to hire his now-wife Carrie Symonds as his chief of staff when he was foreign secretary. Although it was published on its first printed edition, it was then swiftly removed without explanation. [62] It was also mentioned on MailOnline , who rewrote the Times story in the early hours of the morning before also deleting its article without explanation or an editor's note. Rival newspaper The Guardian mentioned that this incident could backfire as an example of the Streisand effect. [62] A few days later on June 21, 10 Downing Street said that the prime minister's special advisers asked The Times to retract the article, leading to questions about the objectivity of the editorship of the newspaper. [63]
In April 2007, a group of companies that used Advanced Access Content System (AACS) encryption issued cease-and-desist letters demanding that the system's 128-bit (16-byte) numerical key (represented in hexadecimal as 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
) be removed from several high-profile websites, including Digg. With the numerical key and some software, it was possible to decrypt the video content on HD-DVDs. 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". [64] Within a month, the key had been reprinted on over 280,000 pages, had been printed on T-shirts and tattoos, had been published as a book, and had appeared on YouTube in a song played over 45,000 times. [65]
In September 2009, multi-national oil company Trafigura obtained a super-injunction to prevent The Guardian newspaper from reporting on an internal Trafigura investigation into the 2006 Ivory Coast toxic waste dump scandal. A super-injunction prevents reporting on even the existence of the injunction. Using parliamentary privilege, Labour MP Paul Farrelly referred to the super-injunction in a parliamentary question and on October 12, 2009, The Guardian reported that it had been gagged from reporting on the parliamentary question, in violation of the Bill of Rights 1689. [66] [67] [68] 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's retweeting the story to his followers. [69] Twitter users soon tracked down all details of the case, and by October 16, the super-injunction had been lifted and the report published. [70]
In November 2012, Casey Movers, a Boston moving company, threatened to sue a woman in Hingham District Court for libel in response to a negative Yelp review. The woman's husband wrote a blog post about the situation, which was then picked up by Techdirt [71] and Consumerist . [72] By the end of the week, the company was reviewed by the Better Business Bureau, which later revoked its accreditation. [73]
In December 2013, YouTube user ghostlyrich uploaded video proof that his Samsung Galaxy S4 battery had spontaneously caught fire. Samsung had demanded proof before honoring its warranty. Once Samsung learned of the YouTube video, it added additional conditions to its warranty, demanding ghostlyrich delete his YouTube video, promise not to upload similar material, officially absolve the company of all liability, waive his right to bring a lawsuit, and never make the terms of the agreement public. Samsung also demanded that a witness cosign the settlement proposal. When ghostlyrich shared Samsung's settlement proposal online, his original video drew 1.2 million views in one week. [74] [75]
In September 2018, The Verge, an American technology news and media network operated by Vox Media, published an article titled "How to Build a Custom PC for Editing, Gaming or Coding" and uploaded a video to YouTube titled "How we Built a $2000 Custom Gaming PC", which was widely criticized for its instructions that would have been harmful or dangerous to both the computer and user if followed, and its numerous factual errors, such as claiming anti-vibration pads were for electrical insulation, and confusing zip ties with tweezers. [76] [77] In February 2019, Vox Media started issuing Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices to YouTube channels which posted content using clips from the video, most notably to technology channels Bitwit and ReviewTechUSA, [76] [78] bringing further attention to the video and the related content they attempted to suppress. [76] After an outcry following the decision, YouTube reinstated these two videos, along with retracting the copyright "strikes" applied. [79]
On February 20, 2020, Apple filed a legal complaint against the sales of the German-language book App Store Confidential, written by a former German App Store manager, Tom Sadowski. Apple cited confidential business information as the reason for requesting the sales ban. However, the publicity brought on by the media caused the book to reach number two on the Amazon bestseller list in Germany. The book was soon on its second print run. [80]
In October 2020, the RIAA filed a DMCA takedown against the youtube-dl repository on GitHub, resulting in the repository and several forks being taken down. However, over 100 forks of the original repository appeared on GitHub in the days following the takedown request. [81]
In May 2023, Nintendo issued a cease-and-desist notice against the Dolphin emulator appearing on Steam. As a result, Google searches of the emulator surged. [82]
In November 2023, PR agency Mogul Press issued a DMCA takedown notice against a blog post [83] [84] by investigative journalist and tax lawyer Dan Neidle which contained commentary that was critical of their business practices. At the time of writing the resulting Twitter threads highlighting Mogul Press' actions have been viewed over 400,000 times (combined). [85] [86]
In January 2008, The Church of Scientology's attempts to get Internet websites to delete a video of Tom Cruise speaking about Scientology resulted in the creation of Project Chanology. [87] [88] [89]
On December 5, 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) added the English 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". [87] The article quickly became one of the most popular pages on the site, [90] and the publicity surrounding the IWF action resulted in the image being spread across other sites. [91] The IWF was 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". [92] This effect was also noted by the IWF in its statement about the removal of the URL from the blacklist. [93] [94]
In June 2012, Argyll and Bute Council in Scotland banned a nine-year-old primary school pupil from updating her blog, NeverSeconds, with photos of lunchtime meals served in the school's canteen. The blog, which was already popular, started receiving a large number of views due to the international media furor that followed the ban. Within days, the council reversed its decision under immense public pressure and scrutiny. After the reversal of the ban, the blog became more popular than it was before. [95]
In September 2022, after an upset loss to Appalachian State, clips of Texas A&M's Midnight Yell Practice started trending on the internet. The clips featured quotes including "What's [sic] are the best 4 years of an Appalachian State Mountaineers [sic] life? The third grade!" along with "I know for a fact that half their football team can barely read the name of their jerseys, let alone read a map." Texas A&M filed several DMCA strikes on several platforms of the clips online, however with the clips being continually taken down and reuploaded, the clips became even more popular. [96]
The Streisand effect has been observed in relation to the right to be forgotten, the right in some jurisdictions to have private information about a person removed from internet searches and other directories under some circumstances, as a litigant attempting to remove information from search engines risks the litigation itself being reported as valid, current news. [97] [98]
In May 2011, Premier League footballer Ryan Giggs sued Twitter after a user revealed that Giggs was the subject of an anonymous privacy injunction (informally referred to as a "super-injunction" [99] ) 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, which were banned from breaking the terms of the injunction, had mocked the footballer for not understanding the effect. [100] Dan Sabbagh from 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. [101]
Similar situations involving super-injunctions in England and Wales have occurred, one[ which? ] involving Jeremy Clarkson. [102] Since January 2016 a celebrity (later revealed outside England and Wales to be David Furnish) used the injunction granted in PJS v News Group Newspapers to prevent media in England and Wales reporting events that have been featured in Scottish media and on the Internet. [103] [104]
In May 2016, Guns N' Roses singer Axl Rose sent a series of DMCA takedown notices to Google, in an attempt to suppress a 2010 image of him that was taken by a Winnipeg Free Press photographer and reposted by Gauntlet, under the headline "OMFG Axl Rose is Fat." [105] This resulted in the "Fat Axl Rose" meme gaining a spike in popularity. [106] [107]
In 2018, Philippine Senate President Tito Sotto requested the Philippine Daily Inquirer to take down three of its online news articles published in 2014 that reported on the gang rape case of 15-year-old actress Pepsi Paloma in 1982. The articles stated that Sotto had intimidated Paloma to drop the case and used his political connections to influence the outcome of the rape case, of which his brother Vic Sotto was among the suspects involved. [108] Tito Sotto alleged in his letter to the Inquirer that the articles "maliciously linked" him to the rape case and "negatively affected" his reputation "for the longest time". In response, links to the articles were mass-shared and archived into posts on Facebook and Twitter to preserve them and sparked renewed public interest into the Pepsi Paloma rape case. Eventually, a month after the request was made, the Inquirer complied with Sotto's request, with links to the former articles now redirecting to the Inquirer's home page. [108]
A satirical play, Two Brothers and the Lions, was written by French playwright Hédi Tillette de Clermont-Tonnerre, about two wealthy British people who live in a castle on the Channel Island of Brecqhou, "who become cold, selfish monsters in the heart of our democratic societies". In reality the billionaire Barclay brothers, owners of the Daily Telegraph newspaper among other holdings, live in a castle on the island. David Barclay sued the playwright in France for defamation and invasion of privacy, though the Barclays were not named in the play. The playwright's lawyer described the play as "a satirical fable on capitalism". Tillette de Clermont-Tonnerre acknowledged that the play was partly inspired by the lives of the brothers. But he said it fell within his right to freedom of expression and said the play had been commissioned to explore the issue of the existence of mediaeval Norman law in the Channel Islands, while ruminating on the nature and future of capitalism. In July 2019 Barclay lost the case. The play had been obscure and only played in small theatres, though critically acclaimed; after the lawsuit performances were scheduled in cities across France. [109]
News media reported about Fred Goodwin's extra-marital affair with a colleague at the Royal Bank of Scotland Group (RBS) where he had previously served as chief executive, so in response Goodwin filed a super-injunction to protect the identity of his former mistress. [110] [111]
Luke O'Neill, an Irish immunologist writing in The Guardian, [112] opined that Bret Stephens, an American Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative journalist, in 2019 achieved "as close to the perfect Streisand effect as one could imagine." Stephens wrote an e-mail to David Karpf, an associate professor of media and public affairs at The George Washington University (GWU), whose tweet calling Stephens a "bedbug" had attracted insignificant interest, saying "I'm often amazed about the things supposedly decent people are prepared to say about other people — people they've never met — on Twitter. I think you've set a new standard." The journalist also cc'd on the e-mail the GWU provost, who later defended Karpf in an open letter posted on GWU's Twitter account. [113] Karpf retaliated against Stephens, by posting the e-mail publicly on Twitter and by writing an op-ed criticizing him in the Los Angeles Times . [114] [113] Stephens was mocked on Twitter and deleted his account there, and the story was picked up by media. [115] [113] [116]
In 2019 author Andrew Seidel sent a copy of his book The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American to conservative evangelical pastor Greg Locke in the hope of starting a conversation about the issues discussed in it. Locke said that he had no intention of reading the book, and burnt it, posting video of the burning on his social media accounts. Response to the video included many replies expressing the intention to purchase and read the book, and to donate copies to libraries. [117]
In November 2022, TV host Pablo Motos took offence in the wake of a Spanish Ministry of Equality TV promo that used an actor to play a male TV host asking a female guest about the kind of clothing she wore to sleep (echoing a similar situation involving Motos and actress Elsa Pataky in El Hormiguero ), in order to denounce sexist attitudes women face on a daily basis. Motos invested 10 minutes of his show to criticise the promo and tell audiences that he is not machista (thus promoting, in prime time, an ad that presumably would have gone relatively unnoticed otherwise), Twitter users shared videos highlighting sexist attitudes by Motos in his show, Motos reportedly tried to take them down via copyright infringement notices from his production company, and they became viral. [118] [119] [120] [121]
In December 2022, Twitter CEO Elon Musk banned the Twitter account @elonjet, a bot that reported his private jet's movements based on public domain flight data. [122] Musk had cited concerns about his personal privacy. [123] The ban drew further media coverage and public attention to Musk's comments on allowing free speech across the Twitter platform. [124] [125] Musk received further criticism after banning several journalists who had referred to the "ElonJet" account or been critical of Musk in the past. [126]
On 19 January 2024, a piano player Brenden Kavanagh, who films himself playing public and freely accessible pianos in London, was interrupted by a group of six holding Chinese flags, saying that he could not record their faces as they were for "Chinese TV". Kavanagh uploaded a clip of the encounter to YouTube, which has received 10 million views as of May 2024. [127]
In March 2024, after an anti-fascist vigilante account on X (formerly Twitter) posted a thread and blog post allegedly exposing the identity of neo-Nazi cartoonist StoneToss, StoneToss made a tweet directly appealing Musk to remove the thread allegedly identifying him. Subsequently, the thread was removed and the account that posted it was suspended; the removal led to numerous users amplifying StoneToss's alleged identity, with many of these tweets, as well as links to the original poster's blog post, being removed and leading to some account suspensions. Commentators including Alejandra Caraballo, whose account was among those temporarily suspended for posting StoneToss's alleged identity, and Rob Beschizza in an article for Boing Boing, referred to the incident as an example of the Streisand effect. [128] [129] After the bans, X updated its privacy policy to include identifying anonymous users as a violation of its policies. [128]
In March 2024, author J. K. Rowling was criticised for comments that denied that transgender people were targeted in Nazi Germany, which several users, including Jewish Novara Media journalist Rivkah Brown, described as Holocaust denial; Rowling replied specifically to Brown threatening litigation. Several weeks later, Brown deleted the criticism and issued an apology to Rowling, which caused the phrase "J.K. Rowling is a Holocaust denier" to become a trending topic on X, which Mira Fox of the Jewish newspaper The Forward compared directly to Streisand's lawsuit. [130]
In March 2024, mining heiress Gina Rinehart asked the National Gallery of Australia that two different portraits by artist Vincent Namatjira be removed from public display, reportedly taking offense at her depiction in one portrait. [131] Kyle Chalmers, an Australian competitive swimmer, who is sponsored by Gina Rinehart, also requested and commented publicly to have a portrait removed. [131] The efforts to remove the paintings from public exhibition resulted in the portraits gaining international media attention. [132]
Elon Reeve Musk is a businessman known for his key roles in the space company SpaceX and the automotive company Tesla, Inc. His other involvements include ownership of X Corp., the company that operates the social media platform X, and his role in the founding of the Boring Company, xAI, Neuralink, and OpenAI. Musk is the wealthiest individual in the world; as of November 2024, Forbes estimates his net worth to be US$323 billion.
Internet censorship in India is done by both central and state governments. DNS filtering and educating service users in suggested usages is an active strategy and government policy to regulate and block access to Internet content on a large scale. Measures for removing content at the request of content creators through court orders have also become more common in recent years. Initiating a mass surveillance government project like Golden Shield Project is an alternative that has been discussed over the years by government bodies.
Twitter, officially known as X since July 2023, is a social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, images, and videos in short posts commonly known as "tweets" or "retweets" and like other users' content. The platform also includes direct messaging, video and audio calling, bookmarks, lists, communities, a chatbot (Grok), job search, and Spaces, a social audio feature. Users can vote on context added by approved users using the Community Notes feature.
The Streisand effect is an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove, or censor information, where the effort instead increases public awareness of the information.
Censorship of Twitter refers to Internet censorship by governments that block access to Twitter. Twitter censorship also includes governmental notice and take down requests to Twitter, which it enforces in accordance with its Terms of Service when a government or authority submits a valid removal request to Twitter indicating that specific content published on the platform is illegal in their jurisdiction.
The British privacy injunctions controversy began in early 2011, when London-based tabloid newspapers published stories about anonymous celebrities that were intended to flout what are commonly known in English law as super-injunctions, where the claimant could not be named, and carefully omitting details that could not legally be published. In April and May 2011, users of non-UK hosted websites, including the social media website Twitter, began posting material connecting various British celebrities with injunctions relating to a variety of potentially scandalous activities. Details of the alleged activities by those who had taken out the gagging orders were also published in the foreign press, as well as in Scotland, where the injunctions had no legal force.
The Babylon Bee is a conservative Christian news satire website that publishes satirical articles on topics including religion, politics, current events, and public figures. It has been referred to as a Christian or conservative version of The Onion.
Mastodon is an open source, self-hosted, social networking service. Mastodon uses the ActivityPub protocol for federation which allows users to communicate between independent Mastodon instances and other ActivityPub compatible services. Mastodon has microblogging features similar to Twitter, and is generally considered to be a part of the Fediverse.
Donald Trump's use of social media attracted attention worldwide since he joined Twitter in May 2009. Over nearly twelve years, Trump tweeted around 57,000 times, including about 8,000 times during the 2016 election campaign and over 25,000 times during his presidency. The White House said the tweets should be considered official statements. When Twitter banned Trump from the platform in January 2021 during the final days of his term, his handle @realDonaldTrump had over 88.9 million followers. On November 19, 2022, Twitter's new owner, Elon Musk, reinstated his account, although Trump had stated he would not use it in favor of his own social media platform, Truth Social. The first tweet since 2021 was made in August 2023 about his mugshot from Fulton County Jail, but the account remained inactive until he tweeted again in August 2024.
X, formerly Twitter, may suspend accounts, temporarily or permanently, from their social networking service. Suspensions of high-profile accounts often attract media attention, and X's use of suspensions has been controversial.
Deplatforming, also called no-platforming, is a form of Internet censorship of an individual or group by preventing them from posting on the platforms they use to share their information/ideas. This typically involves suspension, outright bans, or reducing spread.
Elon Musk is the CEO or owner of multiple companies including Tesla, SpaceX, and X Corp, and has expressed many views on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from politics to science.
youtube-dl is a free and open source software tool for downloading video and audio from YouTube and over 1,000 other video hosting websites. It is released under the Unlicense software license.
Truth Social is an alt-tech social media platform owned by Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), an American media and technology company majority-owned by 45th and 47th U.S. president Donald Trump. It has been called a "Twitter clone" that competes with Parler, Gab, and Mastodon in trying to provide an alternative to Twitter and Facebook. Truth Social uses Mastodon as its backend.
The business magnate Elon Musk initiated an acquisition of American social media company Twitter, Inc. on April 14, 2022, and concluded it on October 27, 2022. Musk had begun buying shares of the company in January 2022, becoming its largest shareholder by April with a 9.1 percent ownership stake. Twitter invited Musk to join its board of directors, an offer he initially accepted before declining. On April 14, Musk made an unsolicited offer to purchase the company, to which Twitter's board responded with a "poison pill" strategy to resist a hostile takeover before unanimously accepting Musk's buyout offer of $44 billion on April 25. Musk stated that he planned to introduce new features to the platform, make its algorithms open-source, combat spambot accounts, and promote free speech, framing the acquisition as the cornerstone of X, an "everything app".
The Twitter Files are a series of releases of select internal Twitter, Inc. documents published from December 2022 through March 2023 on Twitter. CEO Elon Musk gave the documents to journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and authors Michael Shellenberger, David Zweig and Alex Berenson shortly after he acquired Twitter on October 27, 2022. Taibbi and Weiss coordinated the publication of the documents with Musk, releasing details of the files as a series of Twitter threads.
On December 15, 2022, Twitter suspended the accounts of ten journalists who have covered the company and its owner, Elon Musk. They included reporters Keith Olbermann, Steven L. Herman, and Donie O'Sullivan, as well as journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and The Intercept. Musk cited an incident between "a crazy stalker" and a car with his child as a justification for the suspensions. Posters on behalf of the owners of the accounts said that the suspensions were permanent. On December 16, 2022, Musk stated that account access would only be restricted for seven days and on December 17, 2022, some accounts were reportedly restored with Musk citing Twitter community polls as the reason for the reversal.
Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter in October 2022; Musk acted as CEO of Twitter until June 2023 when he was succeeded by Linda Yaccarino. In a move that, despite Yaccarino's accession, was widely attributed to Musk, Twitter was rebranded to X on July 23, 2023, and its domain name changed from twitter.com to x.com on May 17, 2024.
StoneToss is a pseudonymous American neo-Nazi political cartoonist who publishes a webcomic of the same name. Launched in June 2017, the comic espouses racist, sexist, transphobic, homophobic, and antisemitic views, including Holocaust denial.
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)By banning, sanctioning, and erasing, the Israeli legislature succeeded in achieving the exact opposite. This may be a perfect example of Max Weber's "unexpected consequence of human action."
WHAT do Barbra Streisand and the Tunisian president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, have in common? They both tried to block material they dislike from appearing on the internet.
Company announced decision following US intelligence community's conclusion that Russian media outlets sought to interfere with the US election
The ironic thing is, because they tried to quiet it down it's the most famous number on the Internet.
The phenomenon takes its name from Barbra Streisand, who made her own ill-fated attempt at reining in the Web in 2003. That's when environmental activist Kenneth Adelman posted aerial photos of Streisand's Malibu beach house on his web site as part of an environmental survey, and she responded by suing him for $50 million. Until the lawsuit, few people had spotted Streisand's house, Adelman says—but the lawsuit brought more than a million visitors to Adelman's Web site, he estimates. Streisand's case was dismissed, and Adelman's photo was picked up by the Associated Press and reprinted in newspapers around the world.
Apparently, though, CTB's lawyers have not heard of the "Streisand effect".