The Streisand Effect

Joe Dail’s Stepdaughter

This one is quite odd. A man took his 14 year old daughter on a camping trip with his wife (the girl’s step-mother) and later the step-mother posted the pictures on her MySpace page. The pictures included photos of the 14 year old in her bikini, though none of the pictures could be considered inappropriate.

The step-father, Joe Dail, didn’t like his step-daughter’s photos being posted in a public forum like that, so he went to the news to tell the story. The result? The newscast showed all of the pictures in question, as well as showed a link to the MySpace page where they were hosted.

The story was then picked up by other sites (such as Fark) and promoted even further. As of now, the news video has been viewed almost 30,000 times by Fark users, as well as presumably thousands of times by other people.

It was obviously a slow news day for them to waste their time showing this, but it was a pretty funny newscast. At one point, they tried to scare their viewers by showing “how easy it is to steal pictures and do whatever you want with them”. The horrors!

At one point, Mr. Dail said “there could be somebody that could see these pictures and find her and do whatever that they want to do to her”. They couldn’t find her before? Or it’s harder to find her now that they’ve shown the photos all over the news?

Posted in People | |
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King of Thailand

A YouTube user created a video of the King of Thailand, Bhumibol Adulyadej, in which he was portrayed as a monkey.

The Thai government decided their best course of action would be to ban all of YouTube from the country.

The result was YouTube users everywhere creating more clips bashing the king, each of which received tens of thousands of views.

Posted in People | |
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Paula Abdul

In early 2007, Paula Abdul appeared on the “Good Day LA” show and seemed to be a bit tipsy. Her and Fox explained her behavior as “technical difficulties”, but many people felt otherwise.

As the buzz was beginning to die down from the incident, Fox decided to send a DMCA takedown complaint to YouTube and demand that the videos be removed. As expected, this brought renewed interest in the story and many more people watched the video.

Posted in Music, People | |
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Richard Carpenter

As Techdirt put it: “A new Chancellor was selected to lead a Community College District in northern Harris County, Texas. A critical blog was set up to blast the new Chancellor, who quickly had IT block it on all campus computers. As these things always do, it backfired. The college was sued, forced to unblock the blog, and thanks to the media attention, now everyone in Houston knows about the blog.” Didn’t quite work the way he expected, huh? One would imagine that the blog got barely any traffic prior to this. Perhaps ignoring it would have been a better option.

The blog in question: richardcarpenterwatch.blogspot.com

Posted in People | |
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Barbara Streisand

In 2003, Barbara Streisand filed a $50 million lawsuit against Kenneth Adelman because he had posted an aerial photo of her home on his website. His website contained around 12,000 photos of the California coastline as a way to document coastal erosion.

Streisand’s house had gained virtually no attention online until she filed the lawsuit, afterwhich it became very popular.

The image at the top is not the one in question - it’s just a current photo from Microsoft Live Maps. To see the original photo, you can go here.

Posted in People | |
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Sylvia Browne

A man named Robert Lancaster created a site called Stop Sylvia Brown, which makes a case for Sylvia not being a “true psychic medium”.

Whether she is or not, Mr. Lancaster has every right to express his opinion. Sylvia and her lawyers disagreed. They demanded that she stop using her trademark, which showed their lack of knowledge about the law. Trademarks don’t exist so you can stop anyone from using your name — they exist so that people don’t confuse you or your product with another one. For example, if I wanted to say “Coke is awful”, I’m free to do so. However, I can’t create a new beverage and call it “Coke”, as that would be a trademark violation.

As TechDirt put it: “In the meantime, I had not previously been aware of a site criticizing the supposed psychic — but, thanks to her lawyer’s attempt to shut it down, a lot more people know about. You would have thought a psychic would have recognized that such a plan would backfire.”

Posted in People | |
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Washingtonienne

In 2004, a Senate aide named Jessica Cutler kept a very explicit blog titled “Washingtonienne”, in which she detailed her sexual escapades. One of those men listed on the blogs was another aide named Robert Steinbuch, and he was quite upset to find that kind of information on her site.

In typical Streisand Effect fashion, Mr. Steinbuch waited until most people had forgotten about this story only to have to bring it up in court. The reason was to “restore his good name”, but this had the reverse effect as now a whole new group of people got to hear the sordid details.

Court TV has a more detailed article about this, and Wonkette has a copy of all of the blog entries.

Posted in People | |
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Traffic Power

Traffic Power is a company that offers to help improve the ranking of your site in the search engines.

A customer of theirs had a bad experience and created a site to express his displeasure. The Wall Street Journal, who had already written about the case before, decided to dig a little deeper. They found all kinds of things out and made Traffic Power look even worse.

As TechDirt put it, “congratulations to Traffic Power for figuring out how to use the Streisand Effect to magically turn one random blog’s negative comments into a complete negative article in the Wall Street Journal.”

Posted in Websites | |
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Tintin In the Congo

Tintin In The Congo is a series of comic strips in a book, written in 1931 by Belgian author Herge.

In July of 2007, Britain’s equality watchdog (The Commission for Racial Equality) came down hard on the book, accusing it of making black people “look like monkeys and talk like imbeciles”. They also added that it depicted “hideous racial prejudice” and they called for it to be banned.

This caused sales of the book to jump by 3800%. In fact, a few days after they called for the book to be banned, it had climbed to number eight on Amazon’s most popular books list. Four days earlier, it had been at #4,343.

Posted in Books | |
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The Pirate Bay

The Pirate Bay is well-known for their BitTorrent tracking and is a very popular place for people to share music, movies, software, etc.

In May of 2006, The Pirate Bay’s Stockhole were raided and their servers were seized. The MPAA considered it a major victory and made sure everyone knew about the raid.

Three days later, the site was back online and had to add more servers than before to handle the massive increase in traffic that the MPAA had pointed toward them.

Posted in BitTorrent, Music | |
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