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. The effect is named for American singer and actress Barbra Streisand, whose attorney's attempt in 2003 to suppress the publication of a photograph showing her clifftop residence in Malibu, taken to document coastal erosion in California, inadvertently drew far greater attention to the previously obscure photograph. [1] The effect exemplifies psychological reactance: where the desire to hide information instead makes its propagation more likely. [2] [3] [4]
Attempts to suppress information are often made through cease-and-desist letters, but instead of being suppressed, the information sometimes receives extensive publicity, as well as the creation of media such as videos and spoof songs, which can be mirrored on the Internet or distributed on file-sharing networks. [5] [6] In addition, seeking or obtaining an injunction to prohibit something from being published or to remove something that is already published can lead to increased publicity of the published work.
The Streisand effect is an example of psychological reactance, wherein once people are aware that some information is being kept from them, they are significantly more motivated to acquire and spread it. [7]
In 2003, American singer and actress Barbra Streisand sued photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com for US$50 million for violation of privacy. [8] [9] [10] The lawsuit sought to remove "Image 3850", an aerial photograph in which Streisand's mansion was visible, from the publicly available California Coastal Records Project of 12,000 California coastline photographs, documenting coastal erosion and intended to influence government policymakers, of which the photograph of her residence was an overlooked and inconsequential tidbit of information. [5] [11] [12] [13] [14] The lawsuit was dismissed and Streisand was ordered to pay Adelman's $177,000 legal attorney fees. [8] [15] [16] [17] [18]
"Image 3850" had been downloaded only six times prior to Streisand's lawsuit, two of those being by Streisand's attorneys. [19] Public awareness of the case led to more than 420,000 people visiting the site over the following month. [20]
Two years later, Mike Masnick of Techdirt named the effect after the Streisand incident when writing about Marco Beach Ocean Resort's takedown notice to urinal.net (a site dedicated to photographs of urinals) over its use of the resort's name. [21] [22]
How long is it going to take before lawyers realize that the simple act of trying to repress something they don't like online is likely to make it so that something that most people would never, ever see (like a photo of a urinal in some random beach resort) is now seen by many more people? Let's call it the Streisand Effect.
— Mike Masnick, "Since When Is It Illegal To Just Mention A Trademark Online?", Techdirt (January 5, 2005) [23]
The phenomenon is well-known in Chinese culture, expressed by the chengyu "wishing to cover, more conspicuous" ( 欲蓋彌彰 , pinyin :Yù gài mí zhāng). [24] A similar expression appeared as early as the 4th century BC. [25]
In her autobiography My Name is Barbra published in November 2023, Streisand, citing security problems with intruders, wrote, "My issue was never with the photo . . . it was only about the use of my name attached to the photo. I felt I was standing up for a principle, but in retrospect, it was a mistake. I also assumed that my lawyer had done exactly as I wished and simply asked to take my name off the photo." [26]
The French intelligence agency DGRI's attempt to delete the French Wikipedia article about the military radio station of Pierre-sur-Haute [27] resulted in the restored article temporarily becoming the most-viewed page on the French Wikipedia. [28]
In October 2020, the New York Post published emails from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, the son of then Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, detailing an alleged corruption scheme. [29] 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. [30] 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. [31] Twitter removed the ban the following day.
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". [32] Within a month, the key had been reprinted on over 280,000 pages, printed on T-shirts and tattoos, published as a book, and appeared on YouTube in a song played over 45,000 times. [33]
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. [34] [35] [36] 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. [37] Twitter users soon tracked down all details of the case, and by October 16, the super-injunction had been lifted and the report published. [38]
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 the protest movement Project Chanology. [39] [40] [41]
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". [39] The article quickly became one of the most popular pages on the site, [42] and the publicity surrounding the IWF action resulted in the image being spread across other sites. [43] 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". [44] This effect was also noted by the IWF in its statement about the removal of the URL from the blacklist. [45] [46]
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") [47] 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. [48] 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. [49]
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. [50] [51]
An injunction is an equitable remedy in the form of a special court order that compels a party to do or refrain from specific acts. "When a court employs the extraordinary remedy of injunction, it directs the conduct of a party, and does so with the backing of its full coercive powers." A party that fails to comply with an injunction faces criminal or civil penalties, including possible monetary sanctions and even imprisonment. They can also be charged with contempt of court.
Barbara Joan "Barbra" Streisand is an American singer, actress, songwriter, producer, and director. With a career spanning over six decades, she has achieved success across multiple fields of entertainment, being among the first performers awarded an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony (EGOT).
The 2006 Ivory Coast toxic waste dump was a health crisis in Ivory Coast in which a ship registered in Panama, the Probo Koala, chartered by the Singaporean-based oil and commodity shipping company Trafigura Beheer BV, offloaded toxic waste to an Ivorian waste handling company which disposed of it at the port of Abidjan. The local contractor, a company called Tommy, dumped the waste at 12 sites in and around the city in August 2006. The dumping, which took place against a backdrop of instability in Abidjan as a result of the country's first civil war, allegedly led to the death of 7 and 20 hospitalisations, with a further 26,000 people treated for symptoms of poisoning.
Carter-Ruck is a British law firm founded by Peter Carter-Ruck. The firm specialises in libel, privacy, international law and commercial disputes. The leading legal directories rank Carter-Ruck in the top tier of media, defamation and privacy lawyers in the UK.
Michael "Mike" Masnick is an American editor and entrepreneur. He is the CEO and founder of Techdirt, a weblog.
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) is a global registered charity based in Cambridge, England. It states that its remit is "to minimise the availability of online sexual abuse content, specifically child sexual abuse images and videos hosted anywhere in the world and non-photographic child sexual abuse images hosted in the UK." Content inciting racial hatred was removed from the IWF's remit after a police website was set up for the purpose in April 2011. The IWF used to also take reports of criminally obscene adult content hosted in the UK. This was removed from the IWF's remit in 2017. As part of its function, the IWF says that it will "supply partners with an accurate and current URL list to enable blocking of child sexual abuse content". It has "an excellent and responsive national Hotline reporting service" for receiving reports from the public. In addition to receiving referrals from the public, its agents also proactively search the open web and deep web to identify child sexual abuse images and videos. It can then ask service providers to take down the websites containing the images or to block them if they fall outside UK jurisdiction.
Virgin Killer is the fourth studio album by the German rock band Scorpions, released in 1976 by RCA Records. It was the band's first album to attract attention outside Europe. The title is described as being a reference to time as the killer of innocence. The original cover featured a nude prepubescent girl, which stirred controversy in the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere. As a result, the album was re-issued with a different cover in some countries.
On 5 December 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a British watchdog group, blacklisted content on the English Wikipedia related to Scorpions' 1976 studio album Virgin Killer, due to the presence of its controversial cover artwork, depicting a young girl posing nude, with a faux shattered-glass effect obscuring her genitalia. The image was deemed to be "potentially illegal content" under English law which forbids the possession or creation of indecent photographs of children. The IWF's blacklist are used in web filtering systems such as Cleanfeed.
Techdirt is an American Internet blog that reports on technology's legal challenges and related business and economic policy issues, in context of the digital revolution. It focuses on intellectual property, patent, information privacy and copyright reform in particular.
A series of incidents in 2009 led to Church of Scientology–owned networks being blocked from making edits to Wikipedia articles relating to Scientology. The Church of Scientology has long had a controversial history on the Internet and had initiated campaigns to manipulate material and remove information critical of itself from the web. From early in Wikipedia's history, conflict arose regarding the website's coverage of Scientology. Disputes began in earnest in 2005, with users disagreeing about whether or not to describe Scientology as an abusive cult or religion, and continued through the decade.
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.
CTB v News Group Newspapers is an English legal case between Manchester United player Ryan Giggs, given the pseudonym CTB, and defendants News Group Newspapers Limited and model Imogen Thomas.
In English tort law, a super-injunction is a type of injunction that prevents publication of information that is in issue and also prevents the reporting of the fact that the injunction exists at all. The term was coined by a Guardian journalist covering the 2006 Ivory Coast toxic waste dump controversy that had resulted in Trafigura obtaining a controversial injunction. Due to their very nature media organisations are not able to report who has obtained a super-injunction without being in contempt of court.
V. A. Shiva Ayyadurai is an Indian-American engineer, politician, entrepreneur, and anti-vaccine activist. He has become known for promoting conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and unfounded medical claims. Ayyadurai holds four degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), including a PhD in biological engineering, and is a Fulbright grant recipient.
The Wikimedia Foundation has been involved in several lawsuits. They have won some and lost several others.
The child abuse image content list is a list of URLs and image hashes provided by the Internet Watch Foundation to its partners to enable the blocking of child pornography & criminally obscene adult content in the UK and by major international technology companies.
Between 2011 and 2018, a series of disputes took place about the copyright status of selfies taken by Celebes crested macaques using equipment belonging to the British wildlife photographer David J. Slater. The disputes involved Wikimedia Commons and the blog Techdirt, which have hosted the images following their publication in newspapers in July 2011 over Slater's objections that he holds the copyright, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), who have argued that the copyright should be assigned to the macaque.
Thomas Goolnik is a person formerly associated with the company TLD Networks. He has achieved notoriety in a battle over the European "Right To Be Forgotten" (RTBF), in particular whether current articles written about the RTBF are also subject to that regulation.
An Act Relating to censorship of or certain other interference with digital expression, including expression on social media platforms or through electronic mail messages, also known as Texas House Bill 20 (HB20), is a Texas anti-deplatforming law enacted on September 9, 2021.
The 'Streisand effect' is what happens when someone tries to suppress something and the opposite occurs. The act of suppressing it raises the profile, making it much more well known than it ever would have been.
Another unintended consequence of this move could be that it extends the kerfuffle over Ms. Abdul's behavior rather than quelling it. Mr. Nguyen called this the 'Barbra Streisand effect', referring to that actress's insistence that paparazzi photos of her mansion not be used
The 'Streisand effect' is what happens when someone tries to suppress something and the opposite occurs. The act of suppressing it raises the profile, making it much more well known than it ever would have been.
Another unintended consequence of this move could be that it extends the kerfuffle over Ms. Abdul's behavior rather than quelling it. Mr. Nguyen called this the 'Barbra Streisand effect', referring to that actress's insistence that paparazzi photos of her mansion not be used
When I first heard the term, I naively thought, Is that about the effect of my music?" she wrote in her book. "Little did I know.
Image 3850 was downloaded six times, twice to the Internet address of counsel for plaintiffIn addition, two prints of the picture were ordered—one by Streisand's counsel and one by Streisand's neighbor.
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.
Apparently, though, CTB's lawyers have not heard of the "Streisand effect".