A few years ago, my old school magazine featured a pupil’s brief account of a geography field trip. Before the magazine was mailed out, someone had noticed a jokey reference to a minibus being driven erratically after the teacher had visited the local pub, and worried that this might be libellous. The school could have reprinted the magazine, or else thought ‘publish and be damned’. Alas they did neither: they stuck a white sticker over the offending paragraph in every copy. This led to the piece receiving perhaps 1,000 times more attention than it would otherwise have done, the attempt at censorship spotlighting a harmless joke that most people wouldn’t have noticed anyway.
There’s a name for this phenomenon, where attempts at suppressing information are counter-productive and make matters worse: the Streisand effect. It’s so named because in 2003, a project recording coastal erosion released aerial photographs of the Californian shoreline on the internet, including the stretch of seafront containing Barbra Streisand’s clifftop mansion. She (not unreasonably) instructed her lawyers to have her name removed from the photograph, citing security concerns. The lawyers unfortunately overplayed their hand, demanding the photograph itself be removed and seeking millions in compensation. Before the trial, the photograph had been viewed only six times. The case – which Streisand lost – then gained huge media attention. By the end, half a million people had downloaded the photograph.
The Streisand effect is a kind of obverse of Aesop’s ‘Boy Who Cried Wolf’, where repeated spurious attempts to attract attention will lead people to ignore you. What you have instead is ‘the boy who denies the existence of wolves, despite considerable evidence to the contrary’.
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