“The Streisand Effect” or: DON’T DELETE NEGATIVE REVIEWS
Act I: The Diva
Meet Barbra Streisand. And yes — Barbra, not Barbara.
Barbra, these are people. People, this is Barbra. Nice to meet you all.
As we say in Russian: “a sportswoman, a komsomolka (member of Komsomol; Soviet youth organisation), and simply a beauty!” (A very old catchphrase — meaning: she’s got it all.)
I’ll briefly list her achievements as awards — grabbed this from Wikipedia:
So yeah — she’s a big deal in Hollywood history and US show business.
Act II: The Photographer
I couldn’t find a portrait photo of Kenneth Adelman. I did find something, but I’m not sure it’s the right Kenneth Adelman. Still, here’s the point.
Imagine you did the work, delivered the project, and then one day — on a perfectly calm morning — you get hit with a LAWSUIT FOR $50,000,000 (FIFTY MILLION) USD in damages. For what?
People, meet Coastal Photograph No. 3850 from the California Coastal Records Project. Photo, meet people. People, look at the photo.
In this image you can see Streisand’s property as of 2002.
Total photos in the project: 12,200.
Adelman did this with permission and as part of a government-commissioned effort — they were studying coastal erosion.
Before the lawsuit, the photo had been downloaded from pictopia.com only 6 times. Two of those downloads were Streisand’s lawyers.
Act III: The Drama
It’s Streisand. You’ve seen her awards list.
- Associated Press learned about the lawsuit and used the photo in their archive. From there it spread into newspapers worldwide.
- The lawsuit story brought more than a million visitors to the website.
- Within a month of the filing, the image had been viewed by more than 420,000 people.
The court rejected Streisand’s claims and ordered her to pay the photographer’s legal costs — $154,000.
Then in 2005 a blogger named Mike Masnick coined the term “the Streisand effect”. Which means Barbra’s awards list can now include a whole social phenomenon.
Beyoncé:
At some point, Beyoncé — superstar, brilliant vocalist — performed at the Super Bowl (the championship game of the US NFL).
During that performance, this funny photo happened.
Same mechanism, same outcome.
— Delete…
And yet you’re looking at that photo right now, yes?
Telegram:
The closest Russian example is the messenger Telegram.
On 23 June 2017, the head of Roskomnadzor (Russian state communications regulator) warned about a possible block of Telegram if it refused to cooperate with Russian authorities under the “Yarovaya law” (anti-terror legislation; includes data retention requirements). Soon after that, the FSB (Russia’s main security service) claimed Telegram had been used by terrorists while preparing the 3 April 2017 attack in the St. Petersburg metro. After these statements, Telegram’s popularity surged and it reached #1 in the App Store charts.
ATTENTION:
If someone leaves you a negative review, don’t delete it. You have no way to know whether the author already took a screenshot.
Because if they did, and you didn’t respond properly, and you decided to quietly wipe it away… you might summon that heavenly punishment called “the Streisand effect”.
Read my previous piece on VK (major Russian social network) about HOW NOT TO HANDLE NEGATIVE REVIEWS — there’s an example there of a good response too.
One last thing:
I recently took part in a Streisand effect myself.
I was scrolling Twitter (now X) and saw a thread title — a thread (a linked series of posts under one topic).
I scrolled past it. The title didn’t hook me enough to read. Still, I’m not the benchmark for humanity.
Other people read it. Then my whole feed was joking about “Auchan parking” (Auchan; a French hypermarket chain that’s very common in Russia) and “working little holes”. In the end, I read the thread — but only after the author deleted it.
I’ll show it to you too — but fair warning: it’s 18+ content. Keep kids (and the easily unsettled) away from the screen.
I’M SERIOUS. THERE ARE SWEAR WORDS, A LOT OF OBJECTIFICATION OF WOMEN, AND SOME QUESTIONABLE “MORAL COMPASSES”. It can be unpleasant to read. I’m leaving it here to show the phenomenon in full: the info didn’t just spread across Twitter, it can now spread again from this article. And there’s no guarantee I’m the only genius who decided to repost it here.
Scroll fast if you don’t want to read this kind of stuff. There’s a lot here, and parts of it are ugly. From this point on, it’s your call whether you want to “participate” in the Streisand effect.
