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| Barbra Streisand |
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 an example of psychological reactance,
wherein once people are aware something is being kept from them, their
motivation to access and spread the information is increased.
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.
The term
invoked Barbra Streisand who had unsuccessfully sued photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com for
violation of privacy. The US $50 million lawsuit endeavoured 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.
The first condition of progress is the removal of
censorship.
George Bernard Shaw
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