The Streisand effect

Streisand's Very Nice Mansion

The Streisand effect is a phenomenon on the Internet where an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information backfires, causing the information to be widely publicized. Examples of such attempts include censoring a photograph, a number, a file, or a website (for example via a cease-and-desist letter). Instead of being suppressed, the information quickly receives extensive publicity, often being widely mirrored across the Internet, or distributed on file-sharing networks. Mike Masnick said he jokingly coined the term in January 2005 “to describe [this] increasingly common phenomenon”, the name being taken from a 2003 incident in which the singer Barbra Streisand attempted to use legal process to preserve her privacy, only to see the matter become far more prominent as a result.

The effect is related to John Gilmore’s observation that “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

The term Streisand effect originally referred to a 2003 incident in which Barbra Streisand sued photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com for US$50 million in an attempt to have the aerial photo of her house removed from the publicly available collection of 12,000 California coastline photographs, citing privacy concerns. Adelman stated that he was photographing beachfront property to document coastal erosion as part of the California Coastal Records Project. As a result of the case the picture became popular on the internet, with over 420,000 people visiting the site over the next month.

Examples:

1. 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. The church’s attempt to remove a series of OT document leaks from Wikileaks during early April 2008 prompted Wikileaks to respond by vowing to “release several thousand additional pages of Scientology material next week.”
2. On December 5, 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) added the Wikipedia article 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 were later reported on the BBC News website to have said “IWF’s overriding objective is to minimize 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 their statement about the removal of the URL from the black list.
3. Bhumibol Adulyadej, the King of Thailand, was portrayed with feet superimposed over his head, an act extremely offensive to many Thai people, in a video posted by a YouTube user named “Padidda”. The Thai government charged the site with lèse majesté, insulting the monarch, and banned the site altogether. YouTube users around the world responded by posting a series of Bhumibol-bashing clips, some even more offensive than the originals. Each clip has been viewed tens of thousands of times.

Text from wikipedia.