What is the Streisand Effect?

News travels fast – es­pe­cially bad news. It travels even faster when attempts are made to suppress it, however in­sig­ni­fic­ant the initial story actually is. This phe­nomen­on is known as the Streisand Effect, named after the famous singer who fell victim to it.

In 2003, a pho­to­graph­er tasked with doc­u­ment­ing coastal erosion published thousands of aerial photos of the Cali­for­nia coastline on a public image-sharing platform. One of the images showed Barbra Streisand’s beach­front mansion. The singer sued the pho­to­graph­er for 50 million dollars. She lost her case, but by then the story had spread and the location of her home had become public knowledge. The irony here is that without the lawsuit, the photo would never have attracted so much attention – and thus the ‘Streisand Effect’ was born.

The Streisand Effect is nothing new, and those familiar with reverse psy­cho­logy were aware of the phe­nomen­on long before it became known by this name. However, the effect in­tens­i­fied as more and more people went online. Nowadays, we can all share in­form­a­tion more or less where and when we want to, and news – whether good or bad – travels much more quickly. Social media networks are common battle­grounds for this type of issue, and platforms like WikiLeaks provide another outlet.

The Streisand Effect can have serious im­plic­a­tions for companies, and sometimes for in­di­vidu­als too. If a negative report or story is poorly handled or simply swept under the carpet, the brand’s repu­ta­tion may suffer. Sometimes, all it takes is for one person to make a critical comment on Facebook or Twitter or to reveal something con­fid­en­tial, and all hell breaks loose. And if the company doesn’t take the criticism seriously or attempts to ignore or even delete it, they may well find them­selves with a PR nightmare on their hands. To prevent things spiraling and to deal ef­fect­ively with criticism, brands need to give careful thought to crisis man­age­ment and repu­ta­tion man­age­ment.

True marketing pros can also try and use the Streisand Effect to their advantage by de­lib­er­ately keeping quiet about something and relying on others to spread the in­form­a­tion, although this is something of a gamble.

In April 2012, the UK’s High Court ordered five ISPs to block The Pirate Bay (a Bit­Tor­rent website for movies, music, shows, games, ap­plic­a­tions, etc.) since both site operators and users were in­fringing the copyright of music companies. The ISPs began to comply with the ruling, but the media attention ended up working out in the Pirate Bay’s favour with it enjoying its biggest day of traffic ever. Due to the case being on the BBC news, the site got 12 million more visitors that day than it had ever had.

Thomas Panke is a German vlogger who regularly publishes videos about building bricks and kits – mainly, of course, those made by Lego. In one of his YouTube videos, he ac­ci­dent­ally referred to a com­pet­it­or product as a Lego product, and Lego demanded that he take down the video in question. Panke complied with the request but published a letter from his lawyer in response. Due to the Streisand Effect, Lego ended up getting a lot of negative publicity, while the other man­u­fac­turer profited from the situation.

In 2016, German satirist and comedian Jan Böh­mer­mann made headlines with his obscene poem about the Turkish president. Earlier that year, Erdoğan had succeeded in having another satirical music video taken down, and he won his case against Böh­mer­mann too – the court ruled that 75% of the poem could no longer be recited. However, the poem was published in its entirety as part of the court ruling and ended up at­tract­ing a great deal of interest because of the preceding media coverage and debate.

The scandal over Nestlé’s use of palm oil in its KitKat bar dates back to 2010 when Green­peace published a pro­voc­at­ive video in which a man bites into an orangutan finger instead of a chocolate bar. They wanted to draw attention to the fact that the habitats of many animal species were being destroyed in order to produce palm oil. In response to the video, sup­port­ers and activists started flooding the KitKat Facebook page with critical comments. Nestlé responded by deleting the comments and threat­en­ing users, which of course only made things worse and had re­per­cus­sions for the entire company – a classic case of the Streisand Effect at work.