Streisand Effect: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

|'''[[Zero Punctuation|Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw]]'''}}

 

Something horribly embarrassing or personal about you is released—perhaps a sex tape, or a rather embarrassing photograph—and you want that information locked back up. So you do whatever it takes to make the information go away: lawsuits, cease-and-desists, DMCA takedowns, whatever you have at hand. But instead of the information remaining obscure, the information becomes more widely known as the efforts to censor it become public, and people who would otherwise be uninterested are curious as to what the commotion is about. The information gets mirrored and copied and spread at a much faster rate than before the censorship attempt, often to the dismay and frustration of those trying to prevent it, and becoming a [[Self-Fulfilling Prophecy]].

 

 

 

Not to be confused with [[No Such Thing as Bad Publicity]], which is very similar, but occurs when [[Moral Guardians]] attack something and draw more attention to it. This trope is basically that minus the Moral Guardians.

 

{{examples}}

* For lovers of exploitation films, the old list of [[Video Nasties]] put together by the British government makes a great place to start.

* If a movie is [[Banned in China|banned]], expect lots of viewers to seek for it illegally.

* ''[[Citizen Kane]]'' notably averted this. It seems that William Randolph Hearst was [[Genre Savvy|well aware of this trope]]. Rather than having his media empire attack the film, he forbade them from mentioning it at all. It worked. Although the film managed to make enough to break its budget, the lack of publicity prevented it from being a success, and it was largely forgotten about until its revival.

 

* Lynne Cheney (wife of Dick) wrote a novel in 1981 called ''Sisters'', featuring sexual content and lesbianism -- her attempts to prevent a 2006 reprint actually helped publicize it.

* [[McDonald's]] sued a small activist group over a flier being passed out at one of its restaurants, that alleged certain wrongdoings by the fast food chain. If left alone only a couple hundred people may have seen it, but the trial ended up taking over a decade and got [[wikipedia:McLibel|international media attention]]. After spending millions on lawyers, [[McDonald's]] was awarded [[Pyrrhic Victory|£60,000]] in damage from the activists. Of course, it could be argued that the value of dissuading others from attempting libel was more important to them than the costs of the single trial.

* A minor example from '''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]]'', the author of the worst poetry in the universe is named in the original radio show as "Paul Neil Milne Johnstone of Redbridge, Essex" - a former schoolmate of [[Douglas Adams]], who wrote deliberately terrible poetry and who respectfully asked that his name and location be removed from the book adaptations. Thus people now ask why the name changed from Paul to a 'Paula' in Sussex in subsequent versions and discover the story of where Adams got the idea from.

* President [[Donald Trump]]'s reaction to ''[[w:Fire and Fury|Fire and Fury]]'', a derogatory tell-all written by [[w:Michael Wolff (journalist)|Michael Wolff]], could well serve as a critic's lesson on how ''not'' to dissuade someone from reading a book. After passages of the book were leaked, Trump launched an explosive rant on Twitter condemning the book, while his wife, daughter, and White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders condemned it publicly. Trump even sent a cease and desist letter to the publisher threatening a lawsuit if it was released, even as pre-sales on Amazon were reaching record numbers. As a result, the publisher actually released it four days early to meet demands, and it shot to the heights of the bestseller lists in a matter of hours. Many major booksellers reported lines outside their stores not seen since they had new ''[[Harry Potter]]'' releases, selling out stock in two minutes.

** Trump also made a similar rant after [[w:The Lincoln Project|The Lincoln Project]] (a Republican organization opposing President Trump and committed to preventing his reelection) aired their first campaign ad. Few had even heard of the Lincoln Project, a small organization on a meager budget, until then, but such attention changed that quickly, gaining them recognition nation-wide and leading to more and more advertisements.

 

* ''[[Fawlty Towers]]'' and its main character Basil Fawlty was based on Donald Sinclair, an eccentric and irascible Torquay hotelier whom [[John Cleese]] had observed during a stay in his hotel during a ''[[Monty Python's Flying Circus]]'' shoot. Years after the success of the show, Sinclair's widow contacted the newspapers to complain about the depiction of the character based on her husband, claiming that Cleese had unfairly exaggerated his eccentricity, incompetence and foul temper. Far from salvaging her husband's reputation, however, all it did was provoke a lot of independent witnesses to ''also'' contact the papers with a lot of anecdotes that suggested that not only was Cleese not too far off the mark, if anything he'd actually been rather generous. His widow kept silent after that.

** [[John Cleese]] ended up using the name "Donald Sinclair" for his character in ''[[Rat Race]]''.

* A variant of this happened in ''[[Last Week Tonight]]'' where Bob Murray sent a Cease and Desist letter to John Oliver from talking about his scandalous conduct. John, clearly offended that someone would apparently try to stop him through exercising his free speech (although the Cease and Desist letter claims otherwise) gave extra attention to Bob Murray in John's segment on coal after having lawyers vet the script and tried to stick to the script as closely as he could so they would win any subsequent legal action. Unsurprisingly HBO, who greenlit the segment (as evidenced by having lawyers vet the script instead of pulling the plug), stood by John when Murray made good on his threat to take legal action. John then did a segment on SLAPP suits, which ended in a 'Fuck You' towards Murray, in song.

 

* After the release of the [[Queen]] song "Death on Two Legs," former band manager Norman Sheffield decided to sue for defamation, despite the fact that he was never mentioned by name. He succeeded only in informing the world whom the song's scathing insults were targeting.

* [[Metallica]]'s hardline stance on peer-to-peer downloading resulted only in their songs being even more widely pirated. Other bands were hit by this to a lesser degree.

* 2Live Crew's music from the late 80s was mediocre, but after Tipper Gore announced she was trying to censor it, you couldn't escape the album.

 

* ''[[Penny Arcade]]''{{'}}s legal run-in with American Greetings over a [[Strawberry Shortcake]] parody image resulted in the image being spread across the Internet on such a wide basis that it's very easy to find the image nowadays, even though it's no longer on the ''Penny Arcade'' site. To this day, [[Archive Binge]]rs are taking note of AG's overly-protective legal department. Given the near-universal demographic and high [[wikipedia:Fungibility|fungibility]] of the greeting card industry, it's safe to say that they're still losing the occasional sale to it.

** Not to mention the [http://www.penny-arcade.com/resources/just-wow1.html Ocean Marketing debacle].

* ''[[Freefall]]'': Sam Starfall has apparently had previous practical demonstrations of this trope, according to [http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff900/fv00875.htm this strip]

{{quote|'''Sam:''' My original mistakes never draw half the attention as my attempts to cover them up do.}}

* [[David Gonterman]] is one of the earliest cases of the Streisand Effect, going way back to 1995-1998. Initially an unexceptional fanfiction writer and comic artist with enough weirdness to attract a number of [[MST]]s, he invoked the effect when he started throwing tantrums over any criticism and went on a crusade to get all his works deleted from the internet. A number of websites dedicated to archiving his works popped up. On the flip side, were it not for this effect, he would never have achieved the Z-list cult celebrity status he enjoys today.

* In the same vein as David Gonterman is Christine Weston Chandler, creator of ''[[Sonichu]]''. Initially just a random comic artist with big, yet child-like, dreams, the effect kicked in after a random encounter with a member of 4chan lead to the creation of an Encyclopedia Dramatica web page. Her attempts to get rid of it and the incidents it caused on the Internet and in real life would lead to more people to find out more about her and her creation... and a whole lot more - that's a completely different story.

** Predictably, some people posted the encryption key on [[That Other Wiki]], and the administration wanted to have it removed. This led to the same effect in miniature, as other editors copied the key to their user pages and let it spread like wildfire all over again.

* The [[Church of Happyology|Church of Scientology]] ran afoul of the effect in 2008, and probably wishes they could turn back time and take it all back: their DMCA takedown of a video on [[YouTube]] of [[Tom Cruise]] talking about Scientology resulted in the eventual creation of Project Chanology, the ongoing Internet-based crusade to have the Church's status as a religion revoked and to bring to light the various wrongdoings of the Church. Similarly, ''after'' Chanology's creation, attempts by Scientology to have specific documents about the Church and the religion itself erased from the Internet have failed miserably, with mirrors popping up almost as soon as a takedown attempt is issued.

** You'd ''think'' that the Church "probably wishes they could turn back time and take it all back", but you'd be dead wrong: Scientology's founder, Hubbard, said that when dealing with criticism "never defend, always attack". This has led the Church to shoot themselves in the foot so often that Scientology critics coined a term for it, "footbullet". So it's a good bet that if they had the chance to go it all over again they'd either do it exactly the same, or turn it [[Up to Eleven]].

* In 2009, an advertisement from fashion company Ralph Lauren was posted on the blog "Photoshop Disasters" and tech news website [[Boing Boing]] because of the excessively thin appearance of the model in the ad. Ralph Lauren sent a DMCA takedown notice to both Blogspot (the host of "Photoshop Disasters") and Boing Boing; while Blogspot removed the post, Boing Boing refused on the grounds of Fair Use and publicly mocked the takedown notice in a satirical rebuttal. From there, the story picked up steam and was talked about on hundreds of other websites and blogs - each one mirroring the ad in question.

* A debate between Jerry Coyne and John Haught on the subject of compatibility between science and religion ended with the audience firmly on the side of Coyne. After this Haught refused to allow the video of the debate to be distributed. [http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/under-pressure-from-blogosphere-haught-explains-and-relents/ The backlash to this refusal] reached far more people than would normally have been bothered to watch a one-hour academic debate.

* In 2008, [[The Other Wiki]]'s page of the [[Scorpions]]' "Virgin Killer" album became one of the most popular pages on the site after the UK-based Internet Watch Foundation blacklisted it for containing "a potentially illegal indecent image of a child under the age of 18", and the image was even spread across other sites as a result of the publicity. The IWF de-listed it three days later.

* [[Twitter]] has countless examples:

 

* In-Universe: The ''[[South Park]]'' episode "Cartmanland", where Cartman buys an amusement park for the sole purpose of keeping people out and having it all to himself. He might have gotten away with it - if he hadn't aired commercials extolling the park and then stating no one could come. The commercials drew people's attention to the park, and rising expenses (like security to keep them out!) forced him to have to let more and more people in, turning the park from a financial failure to a success - not that Cartman cared...

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Censorship Tropes]]

[[Category:Self-Demonstrating Article]]

[[Category:Pages with working Wikipedia tabs]]