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Streisand effect

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The image of Streisand's Malibu house that led to the naming of the effect.

The Streisand effect is the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet.

It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose 2003 attempt to suppress photographs of her residence in Malibu, California inadvertently drew further public attention to it. 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.

Origin of the term

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. Adelman photographed the beachfront property to document coastal erosion as part of the California Coastal Records Project, which was intended to influence government policymakers. 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. 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.

Selected 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, had been printed on T-shirts and tattoos, and had appeared on YouTube in a song played over 45,000 times.
  • 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".
  • 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.
  • On December 5, 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) added the English Misplaced Pages 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". The article quickly became one of the most popular pages on the site, and the publicity surrounding the censorship resulted in the image being spread across other sites. 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". This effect was also noted by the IWF in its statement about the removal of the URL from the blacklist.
  • Other examples of attempts to remove content from Misplaced Pages resulting in a wider viewership of the content include the French intelligence agency DCRI's deletion of the French language Misplaced Pages article about the Military radio station of Pierre-sur-Haute, resulting in the article becoming the most viewed page on the French Misplaced Pages as of April 6, 2013, and a 2013 libel suit by Theodore Katsanevas.
  • 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 Côte d'Ivoire toxic waste dump scandal, and also from 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 1688 Bill of Rights. 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. Twitter users soon tracked down all details of the case, and by October 16, the super-injunction had been lifted and the report published.
  • In May 2011, Premier League footballer Ryan Giggs sued Twitter after a user revealed that he was the subject of an anonymous privacy injunction (informally referred to as a "super-injunction") 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. 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.
  • In June 2012, Argyll and Bute council 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 an immense number of views due to the international media furore 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.
  • In November 2012, Casey Movers, a Boston-based 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 and The Consumerist as well as the Reddit community. By the end of the week, the company was being reviewed by the Better Business Bureau (which revoked its accreditation) and Yelp for astroturfing reviews.
  • 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.
  • In August 2014, it was reported that a Hudson, New York guest house had a policy that "there will be a $500 fine that will be deducted from your deposit for every negative review of USGH placed on any Internet site by anyone in your party and/or attending your wedding or event" The policy had been used in an attempt to suppress an unfavourable November 2013 Yelp review. Thousands of negative reviews of the policy were posted to Yelp and other review sites.
  • In January 2015, Frederick County Councilman Kirby Delauter threatened a local newspaper with litigation because his name was used in print without his permission. 'Use my name again unauthorized and you'll be paying for an Attorney. Your rights stop where mine start,' Kirby Delauter, the councilman, posted on his Facebook page. He added: 'So let me be clear.........do not contact me and do not use my name or reference me in an authorized form in the future.'"
  • The Streisand effect has been observed in relation to the right to be forgotten, as a litigant attempting to remove information from search engines risks the litigation itself being reported as valid, current news.

See also

References

  1. ^ Canton, David (November 5, 2005). "Today's Business Law: Attempt to suppress can backfire". London Free Press. Archived from the original on 2006-02-17. Retrieved July 21, 2007. 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.
  2. Mugrabi, Sunshine (January 22, 2007). "YouTube—Censored? Offending Paula Abdul clips are abruptly taken down". Red Herring. Archived from the original on February 18, 2007. Retrieved July 21, 2007. 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
  3. The perils of the Streisand Effect BBC News magazine 31 July 2014
  4. Josh Bernoff; Charlene Li (2008). Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business School Press. p. 7. ISBN 1-4221-2500-9.
  5. Since When Is It Illegal to Just Mention a Trademark Online?, techdirt.com
  6. "Barbra Sues Over Aerial Photos". The Smoking Gun. 2003-05-30. Retrieved 2010-11-22.
  7. Link includes lawsuit filings. Streisand was ordered to pay $177,107.54 in court and legal fees. The site has an image of the $155,567.04 check Streisand paid for Adelman's legal fees.
  8. Tentative ruling, page 6, stating, "Image 3850 was download six times, twice to the Internet address of counsel for plaintiff". In addition, two prints of the picture were ordered — one by Streisand's counsel and one by Streisand's neighbor. http://www.californiacoastline.org/streisand/slapp-ruling-tentative.pdf
  9. Rogers, Paul (2003-06-24). "Photo of Streisand home becomes an Internet hit". San Jose Mercury News, mirrored at californiacoastline.org. Retrieved 2007-06-15.
  10. Stone, Brad (2007-05-03). "In Web Uproar, Antipiracy Code Spreads Wildly". New York Times. The ironic thing is, because they tried to quiet it down it's the most famous number on the Internet.
  11. Andy Greenberg (May 11, 2007). "The Streisand Effect". Forbes. Retrieved 2008-02-29. 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.
  12. "Blog standard: Authoritarian governments can lock up bloggers. It is harder to outwit them". The Economist. 26 June 2008. Retrieved 2010-12-06. 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.
  13. ^ Arthur, Charles (2009-03-20). "The Streisand effect: Secrecy in the digital age". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 2010-03-31.
  14. "The Streisand Effect: When Internet Censorship Backfires". Complex. 2009-07-24. Retrieved 2010-04-27.
  15. "What is 'The Streisand Effect'?". The Daily Telegraph. London. 2009-01-31. Retrieved 2010-03-31.
  16. Cade Metz (December 7, 2008). "Brit ISPs censor Misplaced Pages over 'child porn' album cover". The Register. Retrieved 2008-12-09.
  17. Moses, Asher (December 8, 2008). "Misplaced Pages added to child pornography blacklist". Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 2008-12-09.
  18. "IWF backs down on Wiki censorship". BBC News Online. December 9, 2008. Retrieved 2008-12-09.
  19. "Living with the Streisand Effect". International Herald Tribune. 2008-12-26. Retrieved 2008-12-29.
  20. "IWF statement regarding Misplaced Pages webpage". Internet Watch Foundation. December 9, 2008. Archived from the original on 2011-01-01. Retrieved 2013-09-24.
  21. "Communiqué from the Wikimedia Foundation" (in French). April 6, 2013.
  22. Geuss, Megan. "Misplaced Pages editor allegedly forced by French intelligence to delete "classified" entry". Retrieved 6 April 2013.
  23. Sampson, Tim (2014-02-19). "Greek politician who sued Misplaced Pages editor clearly never heard of the Streisand Effect".
  24. David Leigh (2009-10-12). "Guardian gagged from reporting parliament". Guardian. Retrieved 2011-05-21.
  25. David Leigh (2009-10-13). "Guardian seeks urgent court hearing over parliament reporting gag". Guardian. Retrieved 2011-05-21.
  26. Jacobson, Seth. "Twitter claims new scalp as Trafigura backs down". Thefirstpost.co.uk. Retrieved 2011-05-21.
  27. Martin Beckford and Holly Watt (October 16, 2009). "Secret Trafigura report said 'likely cause' of illness was release of toxic gas from dumped waste". The Telegraph.
  28. Townend, Judith (20 May 2011). "Lord Neuberger's report cuts through the superinjunction hysteria". The Guardian. Retrieved 21 May 2011.
  29. Hill, Kashmir (2009-09-30). "He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named (In The UK) Sues Twitter Over A User Naming Him". Blogs.forbes.com. Retrieved 2011-05-21. Apparently, though, CTB's lawyers have not heard of the "Streisand effect".
  30. Sabbagh, Dan (2011-05-20). "Twitter and the mystery footballer". The Guardian. Retrieved 2011-05-24.
  31. Mario Cacciottolo (June 15, 2012). "The Streisand Effect: When censorship backfires". BBC News.
  32. "Casey Movers Threatens To Sue Me Over Bad Review". Retrieved 10 November 2012.
  33. Masnick, Mike. "Latest Company To Discover The Streisand Effect: Casey Movers". Retrieved 15 November 2012.
  34. Moran, Chris. "Moving Company Picks The Wrong Person To Threaten To Sue Over Bad Yelp Review". Retrieved 14 November 2012.
  35. "Moving company threatens to sure for bad Yelp review. Didn't get the response they were hoping for". Retrieved 14 November 2012.
  36. "Casey Moving Company". Retrieved 17 September 2013.
  37. Klee, Miles. "Samsung's Response to a Customer whose Phone Caught Fire Only Made Things Worse". Retrieved 9 December 2013.
  38. Levy, Gabrielle (2013-12-11). "S4 catches fire, Samsung tries to silence report". UPI. Retrieved 23 December 2013.
  39. Siegler, Mara (2014-08-04). "Hotel fines $500 for every bad review posted online". Page Six, New York Post. Retrieved 2014-08-18.
  40. Simon R. (2013). "Union Street Guest House - Hudson, NY (review)". Yelp. Retrieved 2014-08-18.
  41. "This Hotel Fines Customers $500 For Bad Reviews (Yes, There's A Better Approach)". Forbes. Retrieved 2014-08-18. {{cite magazine}}: Cite magazine requires |magazine= (help)
  42. "Lawmaker's Facebook Rant Threatens Media For "Unauthorized" Use of His Namepublisher=slashdot". Retrieved 2015-01-07.
  43. Google's right to be forgotten creates Streisand effect (Recombu, 3 July 2014)
  44. TECHNO FILE: Exercising ‘right to be forgotten’ could spark ‘Streisand effect’ (BDlive, 23 July 2014)

External links

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