What is the Streisand effect? Why hiding things backfires

The Streisand effect is the way an attempt to hide, remove or censor a piece of information can end up spreading it much further than if it had been left alone. A lawsuit, a takedown demand or a gag order becomes a story in itself, and people go looking for what is being hidden. It is named after the singer Barbra Streisand, whose 2003 lawsuit over an aerial photo of her house made the photo famous.

In short

• Suppression sends a signal: it tells people that something is worth hiding, and so worth seeing.
• On the internet, copying is cheap and takes seconds, so a removal demand often multiplies the copies it was meant to erase.
• It doesn't always happen: most quiet removals work, and the effect is named after the ones that fail loudly.

Where does the name come from?

In 2002, the photographer Kenneth Adelman was photographing the entire California coastline from a helicopter for the California Coastal Records Project, a public record of coastal erosion. The project posted about 12,000 images online. Image 3850 happened to show Barbra Streisand's house on a Malibu cliff, though the caption didn't name her.

In 2003 Streisand sued Adelman and the website Pictopia.com for $50 million, arguing invasion of privacy. Before the lawsuit, according to the Wikipedia account of the case, image 3850 had been downloaded six times, two of those by Streisand's own lawyers. News of the suit spread, and in the following month more than 420,000 people visited the site. A court dismissed the case, and Streisand was ordered to pay Adelman's legal fees.

Count what the lawsuit did. Before it, six downloads, a third of them by the people who wanted the photo gone. After it, more than 420,000 visitors in a single month, a rough jump of 70,000 times, comparing visits with downloads. A photo almost nobody had looked at became one of the best-known pictures of a house on the internet, because someone tried to make it disappear.

The phrase came two years later. On 5 January 2005, the writer Mike Masnick, on his blog Techdirt, wrote about a resort that had sent a legal threat to a website of urinal photos over a picture of one of its urinals. He asked how long it would take lawyers to realize that repressing something online is likely to make many more people see it, and ended: "Let's call it the Streisand Effect."

Why does trying to hide something make it spread?

Three forces work together.

1. Suppression is news. A wealthy person suing a photographer, a company gagging a newspaper, a government deleting a web page: each is a story with conflict and a clear villain, and stories travel. The original information rides along with the story about hiding it.
2. People push back against being told what they can't see. Psychologists call this reactance: when people feel a freedom is being taken away, they want the forbidden thing more. Learning that something is being hidden makes it seem valuable, and sharing it becomes a small act of defiance.
3. Copies are cheap. Once information is online, it can be saved, reposted and mirrored in seconds by people the suppressor can't reach. Removing one copy does nothing about the thousands already made, and the attempt to remove it is often the reason the thousands were made.

There is also a fourth, quieter force: legal action leaves a public record. A lawsuit names what it is about in court filings, and journalists read court filings.

What are some well-known examples?

These cases involve organizations and public institutions and are well documented.

Year	Who tried to suppress	What	What happened
2003	Barbra Streisand	An aerial photo of her house	Downloads went from 6 to more than 420,000 visits in a month
2007	The licensing body for the AACS encryption on HD DVDs and Blu-ray discs	A 32-digit key that unlocked the encryption	Takedown demands made it a protest symbol; within a month it was on more than 280,000 web pages, and on T-shirts
2008	The Church of Scientology	A leaked promotional video of Tom Cruise	Removal demands helped prompt Project Chanology, a series of street protests in cities around the world
2008	The Internet Watch Foundation, a UK online-safety charity	The Wikipedia page for a 1976 rock album, over its cover	UK internet providers blocked the page; it became one of Wikipedia's most viewed, and the block was lifted within days
2009	Trafigura, an oil trader, through the law firm Carter-Ruck	Reporting of a question in Parliament about toxic waste dumped in Côte d'Ivoire	The Guardian reported it was barred from reporting a parliamentary question; Twitter users identified it within hours and the gag was dropped the next day
2013	France's domestic intelligence agency, the DCRI	A French Wikipedia article about a military radio station	The article was restored and briefly became the most viewed page on French Wikipedia

In each case, the thing to be hidden was obscure before the attempt and widely known after it. The suppressors also usually lost something besides the information: money, a court case, or public trust.

Does trying to suppress information always backfire?

No, and this is the misconception worth correcting. The Streisand effect describes a risk, not a law. Most takedown notices, quiet settlements and removal requests work exactly as intended, and nobody hears about them, because they worked. The cases that get the name are, by definition, the ones that failed publicly. Judging how often suppression backfires from the famous failures is a textbook case of survivorship bias: the successes are invisible.

Some kinds of suppression are also effective at scale. Search engines remove results under laws such as the European Union's "right to be forgotten", with little public attention to most individual removals. How much a removal matters depends on how people find information in the first place, which is what how search engines work explains. And governments that control a country's internet can make information hard to find for most of their citizens, even if it spreads abroad.

How to tell when it's likely

The effect is most likely when several of these are true at once:

• The method is loud: a lawsuit, a public threat or an official order, rather than a quiet request.
• The suppressor is powerful and the target sympathetic: a celebrity against a photographer, a company against a newspaper.
• The information is easy to copy: a photo, a short text, a number, a video.
• An audience already cares about free speech or the subject: journalists, technologists, online communities.
• The demand looks out of proportion to what is being hidden.

The less of this list applies, the more likely suppression is to work, which is why the best-known cases nearly all tick most of it.

What does it teach?

For organizations, the practical lesson is that the cost of a removal attempt includes the attention it might create. For everyone else, it is a reminder to separate two questions that the effect blurs: whether information is important, and whether someone tried to hide it. Being suppressed makes something feel significant, but it doesn't make it true or important. That is a question of evidence, the subject of critical thinking. Once people have shared something as a stand against censorship, they may also defend it harder than the evidence warrants, the pull described in cognitive dissonance.

Check yourself

• Without looking back: retell the 2003 story with its numbers, and say why the lawsuit, not the photo, made it famous.
• Name the three forces that make suppression spread information, and give an example of each.
• Why does the existence of famous Streisand-effect cases tell you little about how often suppression actually fails?

Sources

• Since when is it illegal to just mention a trademark online? — Mike Masnick, Techdirt, 2005
• Streisand effect — Wikipedia
• Guardian gagged from reporting parliament — David Leigh, The Guardian, 2009
• AACS encryption key controversy — Wikipedia