The Streisand effect

Now: who knows what the Streisand effect is? It is "a paradox when information that is being hidden from third parties attracts even more attention" than was intended (Kocharyan et al., 2022, p. 109), or where the "attempt to remove or censor a piece of information has the paradoxical consequence of publicizing it more widely" (Hagenbach & Koessler, 2017, p. 1). So, something happens, and the powers that be think that we can simply do something to make it go away. But the act of suppression draws even more attention to the very thing that people wanted to remain private (or hidden). Ah, what a lovely intersection with the law of unintended consequences (which I have talked about before here).

While I have heard name, the Streisand effect, mentioned previously, I never stopped to think about how it came to be named. This is quite interesting, all based on the case "Barbra Streisand vs. Kenneth Adelman et al., Case No. SC077257, Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles". Apparently, according to Jansen and Martin, singer and actor Barbra Streisand:

"The California Coastal Records Project is an award-winning, publicly accessible online database containing thousands of photographs of the California coastline. One of these photographs includes the Malibu mansion of celebrity Barbra Streisand. In February 2003, Streisand sued the photographer, Kenneth Adelman, and Pictopia.com, an online photo sales company, for invasion of privacy, seeking $50 million in damages. Before the lawsuit, the photo of Streisand’s residence had been downloaded just six times, two of them by her lawyers. In response to the publicity created by the legal action, however, the photo became an immediate Internet hit, downloaded over 420,000 times within a month. In December 2003, the Los Angeles Superior Court dismissed the lawsuit" (Jansen & Martin, 2015, p. 656). The person who named the effect in 2005 was "Mike Masnick [...], founder of the blogging group Techdirt, who used it to describe cases of legal overreach by trademark and copyright holders" (p. 657; also Maznick, 2003, 2005; Morozov, 2011).

A similar story - but with a key difference - is related by Hagenbach and Koessler, saying that Barbra Streisand:

"sued the California Coastal Records Project accusing it of violating her privacy: one of the many publicly available aerial pictures of the coastline [...] pictured her mansion in Malibu. While less than ten persons had downloaded the problematic picture before B. Streisand asked for its removal, more than 400,000 people visited the project website in the month following her reaction. The picture was also widely spread on the Internet before it was eventually removed as ordered by the court" (Hagenbach & Koessler, 2017, p. 1).

Interesting that in the first article (Jansen & Martin, 2015), the case was dismissed; and in the second (Hagenbach & Koessler, 2017), the image had to be removed. I needed another opinion.

When Barbra Streisand "tried to have a photo of her residence, including the designation of the house, removed from a publicly accessible database on the grounds of invasion of privacy, she on the contrary achieved great publicity for the photo of her house and her efforts to have it removed. This led to huge interest in the photo of her house, as evidenced by the fact that before the lawsuit against the photographer Kenneth Adelman, the photo had only four downloads, two of which were by Streisand’s attorneys, but after the lawsuit there were more than 420,000 downloads. Moreover, the actress lost the case and had to pay $177,000 in attorney fees to Kenneth Adelman" (Mach, 2022, p. 112, citing Chipidza & Yan, 2020, who cite Jansen & Martin, 2015).

OK: that was a bit circular, citing the first source. Of course it does look like the case was lost, rather than dismissed, as the plaintiff had to pay the defendant's court costs (Mach, 2022). However, let's try again. Stewart and Bunton (2016) don't note the ruling, neither does Morozov (2011). It was reported that the court was "dismissing singer Barbara Streisand’s $10 million lawsuit" (apparently a $50m lawsuit, according to Encyclopedia Britannia, 2024), ruled "an effort to silence Kenneth Adelman’s speech about a matter of public concern — protection of California’s coastline — in violation of the state [laws]. Streisand was also ordered to pay Adelman’s legal fees" (Reporters Committee, 2003). OK, so the ruling was definitely against Streisand.

Further, some assume a hidden agenda by Streisand in filing the lawsuit:

Hagenbach and Koessler note that "Ms. Streisand filed a lawsuit against the journalist, who photographed her house in Malibu," with a stated "desire to remove the photo from the website" it had been uploaded to (2017, p. 110). The authors speculate that the reason the lawsuit was actually filed was possibly for PR, to "attract the attention of third parties [by means of] one’s [media] personality" (p. 110), and that the value of "Ms. Streisand’s house increased sharply after the American court considered" the lawsuit (p. 110).

However, is clear that the Streisand effect is not about hidden agendas, and that the actor and singer had security concerns: fans could walk up from a beach below and invade her privacy (Masnick, 2003, 2005). While the meaning could morph into something that is no longer as innocent as it first appeared, at this point it is about the law of unintended consequences, not intended ones.

Sam

References:

Chipidza, W., & Yan, J. (2020). Does Flagging POTUS’s Tweets Lead to Fewer or More Retweets? Preliminary Evidence from Machine Learning Models (No. 69hkb). Center for Open Science. https://osf.io/download/5f83c03e1f65a502dded4092/

Encyclopedia Britannica. (2024). Streisand effect. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Streisand-effect

Hagenbach, J., & Koessler, F. (2017). The Streisand effect: Signaling and partial sophistication. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 143, 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2017.09.001

Jansen, S. C., & Martin, B. (2015). The Streisand Effect and Censorship Backfire. International Journal of Communication, 9, 656-671. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/2498/1321

Kocharyan, H., Hamuľák, O., & Vardanyan, L. (2022). “The Right to be Remembered?”: The Contemporary Challenges of the “Streisand Effect” in the European Judicial Reality. International and Comparative Law Review, 22(2), 105-120. https://doi.org/10.2478/iclr-2022-0017

Mach, M. (2022). Streisand Effect in the Context of the Right to be Forgotten. European Studies, 9(1), 110-121. https://doi.org/10.2478/eustu-2022-0005

Masnick, M. (2003, June 24). Photo Of Streisand Home Becomes An Internet Hit. TechDirt. https://www.techdirt.com/2003/06/24/photo-of-streisand-home-becomes-an-internet-hit/

Masnick, M. (2005, January 5). Since When Is It Illegal To Just Mention A Trademark Online?. TechDirt. https://www.techdirt.com/2005/01/05/since-when-is-it-illegal-to-just-mention-a-trademark-online/

Morozov, E. (2011). The Net Delusion: the dark side of Internet freedom. Public Affairs.

Reporter's Committee (2003, December 4). Court throws out Streisand's invasion of privacy lawsuit. https://www.rcfp.org/court-throws-out-streisands-invasion-privacy-lawsuit/

Stewart, D. R., & Bunton, K. (2016). Practical Transparency: How Journalists Should Approach Digital Shaming and the Streisand Effect. University of Baltimore Journal of Media Law & Ethics, 5(3-4), 4-18. https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.journals/ubjmleth5&i=103