The Streisand effect is the phenomenon in which an attempt to hide, remove or suppress a piece of information instead draws much greater public attention to it than it would otherwise have received. The term originated from a 2003 lawsuit in which the singer Barbra Streisand sued a photographer over an aerial photograph of her Malibu home that had been taken as part of a coastal erosion documentation project; before the lawsuit the image had been downloaded only a handful of times, but after news of the suit spread, several hundred thousand people visited the site within a month. The case became a widely cited example of how legal or public efforts at suppression can backfire.
Facts
Core ClaimAn attempt to hide, remove, or censor information results in the unintended consequence of increasing public awareness of it. 1 First Described Year Classification
Type of Phenomenon Sources
1. Streisand effect, Wikipedia
Lead, first sentence
The Streisand effect is the phenomenon in which an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information results in the unintended consequence of the effort instead increasing public awareness of the information.
Origin section
Two years later, Mike Masnick of Techdirt coined the term 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.
lead section, phenomenon-kind classification
The Streisand effect is the phenomenon in which an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information results in the unintended consequence of the effort instead increasing public awareness of the information.
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