Welcome back on Curiosity.gr. In today’s article I want to talk about a very interesting social phenomena called the Streisand-effect. This effect is named after the American entertainer Barbra Streisand and occurred first in the year 2003 when some photographers took pictures from the coast of California with a helicopter to document the Californian costal erosion.
In one of those pictures, you can see the huge Villa of Barbra Streisand. The organization who took the photos (California Costal Records Project) uploaded all the pictures free to download on their website. Since Barbra Streisand didn’t want people to see her house online, she tried to suppress the picture in court. She had no success and the picture stayed online.
Until Streisand went to court, the picture of her house had been downloaded a total of six times (twice by her layers). But a few months after she failed to suppress is, it had over half a million downloads. This is what is called the Streisand-effect. It occurs when an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information has the unintended consequence of further publicizing that information because people hear about it and wonder what there is to see, that someone else wants to suppress it so badly. The Streisand-effect occurs especially often on the internet, since information spreads a lot faster online.
I hope you found this interesting and see you next week again for another exciting article!