Increased awareness of something after suppression efforts
The original image of Barbra Streisand's cliff-top residence in
Malibu, California
, which she attempted to suppress in 2003
The
Streisand effect
describes a situation where an attempt to hide, remove, or
censor
information results in the
unintended consequence
of the effort instead increasing public awareness of the information.
Origin
The Streisand effect is named after
Barbra Streisand
The term was coined in 2005 by
Mike Masnick
of
Techdirt
after
Barbra Streisand
attempted to suppress the publication of a photograph by
Kenneth Adelman
showing her clifftop residence in
Malibu
, taken to document
coastal erosion
in California.
In 2003, the American singer and actress Barbra Streisand sued the photographer, Kenneth Adelman, and Pictopia.com for US$50 million for
violation of privacy
The lawsuit sought to remove Image 3850, labeled as "Streisand Estate, Malibu", an aerial photograph in which Streisand's mansion was visible, from the publicly available
California Coastal Records Project
of 12,000 California coastline photographs. As the project's goal was to document
coastal erosion
to influence government policymakers, privacy concerns of homeowners were deemed to be of minor or no importance.
10
11
The lawsuit was dismissed and Streisand was ordered to pay Adelman's $177,000 legal
attorney fees
12
13
14
15
"Image 3850" had been
downloaded
only six times prior to Streisand's lawsuit, two of those being by Streisand's attorneys;
16
public awareness of the case led to more than 420,000 people visiting the site over the following month.
17
Two years later, Masnick coined the name 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.
18
19
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)
Streisand's perspective
In her 2023 autobiography
My Name Is Barbra
, Streisand, citing security problems with intruders, wrote:
20
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.
According to
Vanity Fair
, Streisand "didn't want her name to be publicized with [the photo], for security reasons."
21
Since the controversy, Streisand has published numerous detailed photos of the property on social media and in her 2010 book,
My Passion For Design
Mechanism
Attempts to suppress information are often made through
cease-and-desist letters
, but instead of being suppressed, the information sometimes receives extensive publicity, becoming viral over the
Internet
or being distributed on
file-sharing networks
22
Seeking or obtaining an
injunction
to prohibit something from being
published
or to remove something that is already published can "backfire" by increasing the
publicity
of the published work.
23
The Streisand effect has been described as 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.
24
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. A
litigant
attempting to remove information from search engines risks the litigation itself being reported in the news.
25
26
27
28
29
The phenomenon has been described by the Chinese proverb, "(when one) attempts to cover (the truth), (it) becomes more conspicuous" (
欲蓋彌彰
pinyin
Yù gài mí zhāng
).
30
Other examples
In politics and government
When the French intelligence agency
DCRI
tried to delete Wikipedia's article about the
military radio station of Pierre-sur-Haute
, much of which came from a documentary made with the cooperation of the
French Air Force
and freely available online,
31
32
the article became the French Wikipedia's most-viewed page.
The French intelligence agency
DCRI
's attempt to delete the
French Wikipedia
article about the
military radio station of Pierre-sur-Haute
33
resulted in the restored article temporarily becoming the most-viewed page on the French Wikipedia.
34
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.
35
After internal discussion that debated whether the story may have originated from
Russian misinformation and propaganda
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.
36
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.
37
Twitter removed the ban the following day.
Donald Trump
's lawsuit of
The Wall Street Journal
for publishing a letter between Donald Trump and
Jeffrey Epstein
has been described by some as causing a Streisand effect.
38
39
A study found that
banned books in the United States
grew in circulation by 12%, on average, compared with comparable nonbanned titles after the ban.
40
In light of warnings from
Brendan Carr
, the chairman of the
Federal Communications Commission
, that the
fairness doctrine
might apply to
the talk show
CBS
suppressed
Stephen Colbert
's interview with candidate
James Talarico
. It was then presented on
, garnering far more views than it might have gotten if it had been aired on CBS.
41
This was said to be “the Streisand effect".
41
42
By businesses
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".
43
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
in a song played over 800,000 times.
44
In September 2009, multi-national oil company
Trafigura
obtained in a British court 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
45
46
47
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.
48
Twitter users soon tracked down all details of the case, and by October 16, the super-injunction had been lifted and the report published.
49
On March 11, 2025, the book
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
by Sarah Wynn-Williams was published. It details the author’s experiences working at
(now
Meta
) and explores the company’s internal culture, decision-making processes, and role in reshaping global events. Meta CEO
Mark Zuckerberg
responded by seeking relief at the Emergency International Arbitral Tribunal, which enjoined Wynn-Williams "from making orally, in writing, or otherwise any disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments to any person or entity concerning [Meta], its officers, directors, or employees".
50
51
Macmillan
, the UK publisher, later issued a statement saying that it would ignore the ruling.
50
The book reached number one on the
New York Times
bestseller list
by March 20, 2025.
52
Meta described the book as "a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about [its] executives".
52
By other organizations
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
53
54
55
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".
53
The article quickly became one of the most popular pages on the site,
56
and the publicity surrounding the IWF action resulted in the image being spread across other sites.
57
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".
58
This effect was also noted by the IWF in its statement about the removal of the URL from the blacklist.
59
60
By individuals
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")
61
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.
62
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.
63
In 2013, a
BuzzFeed
article showcasing photos from the
Super Bowl
contained several photos of
Beyoncé
making unflattering poses and faces, resulting in her publicist contacting BuzzFeed via email and requesting the removal of the images.
64
In response to the email, BuzzFeed republished the images, which subsequently became much more well-known across the internet.
65
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,
66
citing concerns about his family's safety.
67
The ban drew further media coverage and public attention to Musk's comments on allowing free speech across the Twitter platform.
68
69
Musk received further criticism after banning several journalists who had referred to the "ElonJet" account or been critical of Musk in the past.
70
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External links