Dictionary

Streisand effect en · NOUN

Pronunciation

• (Australia) audio
• /ˈstɹaɪ.sænd əˌfɛkt/ (US)

Etymology

Coined by Mike Masnick in 2005, after a 2003 incident in which singer Barbra Streisand attempted to have a picture of her house removed from a public collection of 12,000 images documenting coastal erosion in California.

Meanings

1. A phenomenon in which attempting to suppress an item of information attracts even more unwanted attention, thus furthering its dissemination.
   • Though, the action of the US government was intended to suppress the leaks, the ‘Streisand effect’ made sure that the outcome was exactly the opposite. People all over the world, who hadn’t even heard of the Website, were typing WikiLeaks.org on their keyboards only to find a site-unavailable message, which increased their curiosity. People sympathetic to WikiLeaks, in the meantime, had voluntarily mirrored the website in order to keep it online. 2010 December 17, K Vaidya Nathan, “Beware the Streisand effect”, in The Indian Express, The Indian Express Limited, retrieved 29 Oct 2012:
   • But that hasn't stopped Beck's lawyers from trying to shut down the site -- resulting in more blowback and another manifestation of the dreaded Streisand Effect! 2009 September 11, Jim Emerson, “Teaching the controversy”, Scanners, in Chicago Sun-Times, archived from the original on 15 Sep 2009:
   • Say you discover that people aren't just talking about you, they're bashing you. Should you step in and try to stop them? Again, the answer is absolutely no! Leave them alone – you'll only make the problems worse and create a Streisand Effect if you try to hush them up. 2009, Kyle Lacy, Twitter Marketing For Dummies, For Dummies, →ISBN, page 215:
   • No matter how effective your rebuttal may seem to be to you, a response will "bump" the problem into greater prominence and relevance in the search engine results, which then turns your headache into a migraine. This is doubly dangerous since "bumping" the negative information potentially introduces the "Streisand Effect" into the equation, which is something to avoid if at all possible. It is commonly defined as a phenomenon in which an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information on the web backfires, causing greater publicity. 2009, John W. Dozier, Sue Scheff, Google Bomb: The Untold Story of the $11.3M Verdict That Changed the Way We Use the Internet, HCI, →ISBN, page 40:

Forms

Deriveds

Streisand

Relateds

censorship · backfire · freedom of speech · epic fail

Translations (10)

pt efeito Streisand (phenomenon) · de Streisand-Effekt (phenomenon) · ru эффе́кт Стре́йзанд (phenomenon) · fr effet Streisand (phenomenon) · tr Streisand etkisi (phenomenon) · fi Streisand-ilmiö (phenomenon) · cmn 史翠珊效應 /史翠珊效应 (phenomenon) · pl Efekt Streisand (phenomenon) · it effetto Streisand (phenomenon) · ja ストライサンド効果 (phenomenon)

wikipedia: Barbra Streisand · wikipedia: California Coastal Records Project