What is the Streisand Effect and 5 of its striking examples

Among the many social phenomena, the Streisand effect is perhaps the most common. We are sure that you yourself have seen it in action many times, perhaps you just didn't know about it.

Let's find out what this effect is, and at the same time remember the most striking examples of it.

The Streisand effect is a social phenomenon that clearly demonstrates the unspoken rule: the more diligently you try to hide something, the sooner it will come out. This is what happened with Barbra Streisand. One day, she discovered that on the website Pictopia.com a photo of her house appeared. Or rather, not so: Barbara's house was depicted in the photo next to other similar houses on the coast. And in general, the picture was intended to demonstrate the erosion of the soil on the beach, but Barbara did not like such publicity.

Singer Barbara Streisand, after whom the effect was named

The singer filed a lawsuit for $ 10 million against photographer Kenneth Adelman demanding that the photo be removed. She motivated this by the fact that the picture violates her rights. By the way, in addition to this photo, tens of thousands of other similar photos were posted on the service, and this particular photo was downloaded only six times, two of them by the singer's lawyer. The court proceedings ended with the fact that Streisand's claim was rejected and they demanded that she compensate the legal costs to the author of that ill-fated photo.

The same photo

But the most interesting thing is that after the case was made public, the number of photo views increased dramatically. A month later, the site was visited by more than 420 thousand users. But there would not have been all this turmoil, the Streisand house in the photo could not have been noticed at all. As well as the photo itself in principle. This is how the Streisand effect appeared.

Now it includes all phenomena in which a person or a group of people try to hide something, but instead, on the contrary, only lead to an even greater spread of undesirable information for them. There are a lot of similar cases, and here are the most striking examples.

Age and excessive love for sweets make themselves felt. So the handsome soloist from Guns'n'Roses, for whom all the girls were pining in their youth, turned into a fat, flabby lout. And everything would be fine if Axel did not start trying to fight public opinion. The man demanded that Google delete all the photos where he looks full.

Naturally, this led to the fact that the photos of the chubby Axel began to be used more and more, making funny memes out of them.

For eight years now, the Internet has annually celebrated the day when Beyonce's lawyer "deleted" her photos from the Network. As you can see from the picture above, I deleted it unsuccessfully. It all started with the singer's performance at the Super Bowl in 2013. Among the many photos of Beyonce on stage, there were about five extremely unsuccessful ones. And, again, the trouble could have bypassed the celebrity side, if her PR woman had not tried to get rid of the pictures.

She wrote a letter to BuzzFeed, which published a series of photos, demanding that all unflattering shots be removed. And even specified which ones. But BuzzFeed instead made a separate selection of unsuccessful pictures of Beyonce and attached an email from the PR woman to them. The Streisand effect was not long in coming – on the same day, unsuccessful photos of the star flew around the whole world.

It's no secret that fashion brands use Photoshop, and not always successfully. But the Ralph Lauren ad in 2009, we can say, became the standard of mediocre retouching. The waist of the model in the photo turned out to be too narrow and unnatural, and the head because of this looked huge and disproportionate.

Soon the photo caused a wave of public indignation and led to the fact that Ralph Lauren had to personally apologize for the "distortion of the female body". So, trying to hide minor flaws that hardly anyone would pay attention to, the brand ran into major problems.

A few years ago, a YouTube user under the nickname Ghostlyrich posted a video online in which he said that his Samsung smartphone exploded. Initially, the video was not particularly popular – you never know who and what can tell. But when the company tried to hush up this case, the situation changed dramatically.

After Samsung asked the guy to shoot a "normal video" in exchange for a new smartphone, Ghostlyrich recorded another video. In it, he "ran into" the company and talked about the insecurity of its products. Very soon, the video went viral, and a lot of other stories about exploding smartphones appeared on the Internet.

Everyone knows that Tom Cruise is an open follower of the Church of Scientology. Once in an interview, he spoke in detail about this organization. This video was subsequently widely replicated, trying to attract public attention to this religion in this way. Attracted… However, not as much as I wanted. Many criticized both the actor and the church itself, which is why they tried to hastily delete the video.

Of course, the attempts did not give the desired result. Instead, the Streisand effect worked again. The video went viral and even provoked the appearance of the Chanology project, whose actions are directed against the Church of Scientology.