Streisand Effect: Difference between revisions

{{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.

* The MPAA encountered this in 2007; it attempted to stop popular social aggregator Digg from allowing an encryption key to the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats from being posted with a DMCA takedown. When the takedown attempt became public knowledge, hundreds of stories containing the key were submitted and upvoted on Digg. For hours, dozens of repetitions of the magic number formed literally the ''only'' content on the entire front page of the site. Simultaneously, dozens of other websites mirrored the key in defiance of the censorship. Eventually, Digg executives threw up their hands and said, "Fine. You guys want this information here so bad, so we won't try to stop you anymore." And the MPAA couldn't really do anything about it, because the way Digg works, the chances were slightly worse than "hopeless" that the initial DMCA takedown would have really worked anyway. In layman's terms, the legal system only works because people let it; if enough people refuse to, the law has nothing it can actually do about it. More people probably can recognize the string of numbers that who ever bought a HD-DVD player.

** 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.