The Streisand effect is an Internet phenomenon 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.[1][2]
The effect is related to John Gilmore's observation that "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it".[3]
Origin
Mike Masnick originally coined the term Streisand effect in reference to a 2003 incident where 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.[1][4][5] Adelman stated that he was photographing beachfront property to document coastal erosion as part of the California Coastal Records Project.[6] As a result of the case the picture became popular on the Internet, with more than 420,000 people visiting the site over the next month.[7]
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Examples
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.[8] Similarly, the church attempted to remove a series of OT document leaks from Wikileaks during early April 2008. Wikileaks responded by vowing to "release several thousand additional pages of Scientology material next week", and promptly did so.[9]
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".[10] The article quickly became one of the most popular pages on the site,[11] and the publicity surrounding the censorship resulted in the image being spread across other sites.[12] 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".[13] This effect was also noted by the IWF in their statement about the removal of the URL from the black list.[9][14]
An attempt at blocking an HD-DVD key from being published on Digg caused uproar when cease-and-desist letters demanded that the code be removed from several high-profile Web sites. This led to the key's proliferation across other web 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, and had appeared in a song on YouTube which had been played over 45,000 times.[15][16][17]
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 banned the site for lèse majesté, and many other YouTube users responded by posting other clips even more offensive to Bhumibol, leading to tens of thousands of views.[17]
Video clips portraying paparazzi footage of Brazilian television personality Daniela Cicarelli having sex with her boyfriend on a beach in Spain were uploaded to YouTube. Court injunctions, which culminated in the blocking of YouTube in Brazil, proved unsuccessful in preventing the spread of the video, and only raised the ire of fans.[17]