Streisand effect

• 1. Introduction

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  The Streisand effect is named for a photograph that almost nobody had looked at. Before the singer and actress Barbra Streisand took legal action over it, the image had been downloaded only six times. Two of those downloads came from her own attorneys. The phrase now describes any attempt to hide, remove, or censor information that ends up drawing far more attention to it. How did one aerial picture of a house become the emblem of that reversal? What did Streisand say she was actually trying to do? And why do governments, corporations, and celebrities keep making the same move?

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• 2. Image 3850

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  In 2003, Barbra Streisand sued the photographer Kenneth Adelman and the website Pictopia.com for 50 million US dollars, alleging a violation of privacy. The target was a single aerial photograph labeled Image 3850 and captioned "Streisand Estate, Malibu". It showed her clifftop mansion.

  The picture sat inside the California Coastal Records Project, a collection of 12,000 photographs of the California coastline. The project existed to document coastal erosion so that government policymakers could act on it. With that purpose, the privacy worries of individual homeowners were treated as minor or irrelevant.

  The lawsuit failed. It was dismissed, and Streisand was ordered to pay Adelman's attorney fees, which came to $177,000. The larger cost was publicity. Over the month that followed, more than 420,000 people visited the project's site.

  The phrase for what happened to her did not appear until two years later, and it came from a dispute over a beach resort.

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• 3. A Name and Its Namesake

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  Mike Masnick of Techdirt coined the term in 2005, while writing about a takedown notice from Marco Beach Ocean Resort. The notice went to urinal.net, a site devoted to photographs of urinals, and objected to its use of the resort's name. Masnick wrote: "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."

  Streisand gave her own account in her 2023 autobiography, My Name Is Barbra. She cited security problems with intruders. She wrote: "My issue was never with the photo … it was only about the use of my name attached to the photo." She described herself as believing she was defending a principle, but added that "in retrospect, it was a mistake". She had also assumed her lawyer would simply ask for her name to be taken off the photo.

  Vanity Fair reported a similar motive: she "didn't want her name to be publicized with the photo, for security reasons." Since the controversy, Streisand has published numerous detailed photos of the property on social media and in her 2010 book, My Passion for Design.

  The urge her lawsuit unintentionally fed has a name in psychology.

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• 4. Why Secrecy Backfires

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  Psychological reactance is the idea that people become far more motivated to find and share information once they learn it is being kept from them. The Streisand effect has been described as an example of it.

  Cease-and-desist letters are a frequent first move in suppression attempts. Instead of vanishing, the targeted material sometimes gains extensive publicity, going viral online or spreading across file-sharing networks. Seeking or winning an injunction to stop publication, or to pull down something already published, can likewise backfire by multiplying the audience.

  The right to be forgotten shows the same risk. In some jurisdictions, a person can ask to have private information removed from internet searches and other directories under certain circumstances. A litigant who goes to court to remove such results risks seeing the litigation itself reported in the news.

  A Chinese proverb describes the dynamic: when one tries to cover up the truth, it only becomes more conspicuous. The saying is written 欲蓋彌彰, and the cases ahead show it at work in very different arenas.

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• 5. Companies Try to Gag

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  In April 2007, a group of companies using Advanced Access Content System encryption sent cease-and-desist letters to several high-profile websites, including Digg. They wanted a 128-bit numerical key removed, a number 16 bytes long. With that key and some software, anyone could decrypt video on HD DVDs. Instead, the key spread across other sites and chat rooms in many formats, and one commentator called it "the most famous number on the Internet". Within a month it had been reprinted on over 280,000 pages. It also appeared on T-shirts and tattoos, in a book, and in a YouTube song played over 800,000 times.

  In September 2009, the oil company Trafigura won a super-injunction from a British court. It barred The Guardian from reporting on an internal Trafigura investigation into the 2006 Ivory Coast toxic waste dump scandal. A super-injunction forbids reporting even that the injunction exists. Labour MP Paul Farrelly used parliamentary privilege to mention it in a parliamentary question.

  On the 12th of October 2009, The Guardian reported that it had been gagged from covering that question, in violation of the Bill of Rights 1689. The blogger Richard Wilson correctly guessed that the blocked question concerned the Trafigura scandal, and The Spectator suggested the same. Soon Trafigura was trending on Twitter, helped along when Stephen Fry retweeted the story to his followers. Twitter users tracked down every detail of the case. By the 16th of October, the super-injunction had been lifted and the report published.

  On the 11th of March 2025, Sarah Wynn-Williams published Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism. The book draws on her work at Facebook, now Meta, and examines the company's internal culture, its decision-making, and its role in reshaping global events. Mark Zuckerberg responded by seeking relief at the Emergency International Arbitral Tribunal. The tribunal enjoined Wynn-Williams from making disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments about Meta, its officers, directors, or employees.

  Macmillan, the UK publisher, later said it would ignore the ruling. By the 20th of March 2025, the book had reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Meta described it as "a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about its executives".

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• 6. Governments and Platforms

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  The French intelligence agency DCRI pressed to have an online article about the military radio station at Pierre-sur-Haute deleted. Once the article was restored, it briefly drew more readers than any other page on the French edition of the site.

  In October 2020, the New York Post published emails from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, son of then Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. The emails detailed an alleged corruption scheme. Twitter staff debated whether the story might stem from Russian misinformation and propaganda, then blocked it. Accounts that shared a link were locked, including the Post's own account and that of White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany. Researchers at MIT cited a jump from 5,500 shares every 15 minutes to about 10,000 shortly after the block. They read it as evidence that the censorship nearly doubled the attention. Twitter lifted the ban the following day.

  Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, warned that the fairness doctrine might apply to a CBS talk show. CBS then suppressed Stephen Colbert's interview with candidate James Talarico. The interview was presented on YouTube instead, where it drew far more views than it might have gotten on CBS. Observers described this as an example of the Streisand effect.

  In 2025, Donald Trump sued The Wall Street Journal for publishing a letter between Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. Some have described that lawsuit as causing a Streisand effect of its own.

  A 2025 study put a number on the pattern for books. Banned titles in the United States grew in circulation by 12% on average, compared with similar titles that were not banned.

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• 7. Institutions and Individuals

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  In January 2008, the Church of Scientology tried to get websites to delete a video of Tom Cruise speaking about Scientology. The attempt led to the creation of the protest movement Project Chanology.

  On the 5th of December 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation added the English article about the 1976 Scorpions album Virgin Killer to a child pornography blacklist. It judged the cover art "a potentially illegal indecent image of a child under the age of 18". The article quickly became one of the most popular pages on the site, and the image spread to other sites. The foundation told the BBC News website: "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". It repeated the point in its statement about removing the URL from the blacklist.

  In May 2011, the Premier League footballer Ryan Giggs sued Twitter. A user had revealed that he was the subject of an anonymous privacy injunction, informally called a super-injunction, covering an alleged affair with model and former Big Brother contestant Imogen Thomas. A Forbes blogger observed that the British media, barred from breaking the injunction, had mocked the footballer for not grasping the effect. Dan Sabbagh of The Guardian then posted a graph, without naming the player, tracking mentions of his name over time. It showed a large spike after news that he was seeking legal action.

  In 2013, a BuzzFeed article of Super Bowl photos included several shots of Beyoncé making unflattering poses and faces. Her publicist emailed BuzzFeed asking for the images to be removed. BuzzFeed responded by republishing them, and they became much more widely known across the internet.

  In December 2022, Twitter CEO Elon Musk banned @elonjet, a bot that reported the movements of his private jet. He cited concerns about his family's safety. The bot relied on public domain flight data, and the ban drew further media coverage and attention to Musk's comments on allowing free speech on the platform. Criticism grew when he also banned several journalists who had referred to the account or had criticized him in the past.

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