Coined 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.
- A phenomenon in which attempting to suppress an item of information attracts even more unwanted attention, thus furthering its dissemination.
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 0757314155, page 40:
- 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, Kyle Lacy, Twitter Marketing For Dummies, For Dummies, ISBN 0470561726, page 215:
- 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.
2010 December 17, K Vaidya Nathan, “Beware the Streisand effect”, The Indian Express, The Indian Express Limited, retrieved on 2012-10-29:
- 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.
- For more examples of usage of this term, see the citations page.
- Streisand effect on Wikipedia.en.Wikipedia
- English “Streisand v. Adelman, assessment by United States House Committee on the Judiciary” on Wikisource. English Wikisource: Streisand v. Adelman, assessment by United States House Committee on the Judiciary
- Streisand effect on Wikiquote.en.Wikiquote
- Category:Streisand effect on English Wikinews. English Wikinews: Category:Streisand effect
- Category:Streisand effect on Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia Commons: Category:Streisand effect
- ^ Mario Cacciottolo. "The Streisand Effect: When censorship backfires", BBC News, BBC, June 15, 2012. Retrieved on October 29, 2012.
- ^ Mike Masnick. "Since When Is It Illegal To Just Mention A Trademark Online?", techdirt: Legal Issues, January 5, 2005. Retrieved on October 29, 2012.
- ^ Milo Yiannopoulos. "What is 'The Streisand Effect'?", The Daily Telegraph, Telegraph Media Group Limited, January 31, 2009. Retrieved on October 29, 2012.