The Streisand Effect
How trying to hide something guaranteed that everyone would see it.
2 min read · from UNINTENDED by Mayank Mehta
In 2003, a photographer named Kenneth Adelman flew a helicopter along the California coast and took twelve thousand pictures of the shoreline. The photographs were part of a public project to document coastal erosion. They were uploaded to a website and archived alongside thousands of other images. Almost nobody looked at them.
One of the photographs happened to include Barbra Streisand's Malibu estate. Streisand's lawyers, citing privacy concerns, sent a letter demanding the image be removed from the database. When the website declined, Streisand filed a lawsuit seeking fifty million dollars in damages.
Before the lawsuit, the photograph of her house had been downloaded exactly six times, two of which were by her own lawyers.
The lawsuit made national news. Journalists wrote about it. Bloggers linked to the photograph. Hundreds of thousands of people visited the website specifically to see the image that Barbra Streisand didn't want them to see. Within a month, the photo had been viewed over four hundred thousand times.
The lawsuit was dismissed. Streisand was ordered to pay the defendant's legal fees. And her name became permanently attached to a phenomenon that internet users had long observed but never named. The Streisand Effect describes any attempt to suppress information that instead draws far more attention to it than it would otherwise have received.
The principle has proven remarkably durable. Governments that ban websites see traffic to those sites increase through proxy servers. Companies that demand negative reviews be removed watch those reviews go viral. Lawyers who send cease-and-desist letters to bloggers often discover that the letter itself becomes the story.
In a networked world, the act of trying to hide something is itself a signal. It tells people that something is worth seeing, and in the age of the internet, that's the one invitation nobody can resist.