Prattusa Mallik
Named after birthday girl and American actor-singer Barbra Streisand, the Streisand effect is a phenomenon where an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information inadvertently leads to its wider dissemination and increased public attention.
The origin of the term dates back to 2003 when Barbara sued photographer Kenneth Adelman for including an aerial photograph of her Malibu mansion among thousands of other California coastline photos in a publicly accessible online database documenting coastal erosion.
Before Barbara’s lawsuit, the photograph had been downloaded only a handful of times, reportedly just six, with two of those downloads by her own attorneys. However, the lawsuit generated significant media attention. As a result, the image became widely publicised, and the website hosting the photo received over 4,20,000 visits in the following month. This attempt to suppress the image had the opposite effect, making it far more visible than it would have been otherwise.
The Streisand effect is often attributed to psychological reactance, a theory suggesting that when people feel their freedom to access information is threatened, they are motivated to seek out and spread that information even more. In 2020, when Twitter briefly blocked a New York Post article and locked accounts that shared it, the story’s visibility and sharing significantly increased before the ban was reversed.