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The Streisand effect describes a situation where an attempt to hide, remove, or Censorship information results in the unintended consequence of the effort instead increasing public awareness of the information.
The term was coined in 2005 by Mike Masnick after Barbra Streisand attempted to suppress the publication of a photograph by Kenneth Adelman showing her clifftop residence in Malibu, taken to document coastal erosion in California. Her efforts inadvertently drew widespread attention to the previously obscure photograph.
In 2003, the American singer and actress Barbra Streisand sued the photographer, Kenneth Adelman, and Pictopia.com for US$50 million for violation of privacy. The lawsuit sought to remove "Image 3850", an aerial photograph in which Streisand's mansion was visible, from the publicly available California Coastal Records Project of 12,000 California coastline photographs. As the project's goal was to document coastal erosion to influence government policymakers, privacy concerns of homeowners were deemed to be of minor or no importance.
The lawsuit was dismissed and Streisand was ordered to pay Adelman's $177,000 legal attorney fees. Streisand v. Adelman, et al., in California Superior Court; Case SC077257 "Image 3850" had been Download only six times prior to Streisand's lawsuit, two of those being by Streisand's attorneys; In addition, two prints of the picture were ordered—one by Streisand's counsel and one by Streisand's neighbor. public awareness of the case led to more than 420,000 people visiting the site over the following month.
Two years later, Mike Masnick of Techdirt named the effect after the Streisand incident when writing about Marco Beach Ocean Resort's takedown notice to urinal.net (a site dedicated to photographs of ) over its use of the resort's name.
My issue was never with the photo ... it was only about the use of my name attached to the photo. I felt I was standing up for a principle, but in retrospect, it was a mistake. I also assumed that my lawyer had done exactly as I wished and simply asked to take my name off the photo.According to Vanity Fair, "she... didn't want her name to be publicized with the, for security reasons." Since the controversy, Streisand has published numerous detailed photos of the property on social media and in her 2010 book, My Passion For Design.
The Streisand effect has been described as an example of psychological reactance, wherein once people are aware that some information is being kept from them, they are significantly more motivated to acquire and spread it.
The Streisand effect has been observed in relation to the right to be forgotten, the right in some jurisdictions to have private information about a person removed from internet searches and other directories under some circumstances. A Lawsuit attempting to remove information from search engines risks the litigation itself being reported in the news.
The phenomenon has been described by the Chinese proverb, " wishing to cover, one becomes more conspicuous" (欲蓋彌彰]], hp=Yù gài mí zhāng).
In October 2020, the New York Post published emails from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, the son of then Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, detailing an alleged corruption scheme. After internal discussion that debated whether the story may have originated from Russian misinformation and propaganda, Twitter blocked the story from their platform and locked the accounts of those who shared a link to the article, including the New York Post own Twitter account, and White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, among others. Researchers at MIT cited the increase of 5,500 shares every 15 minutes to about 10,000 shares shortly after Twitter censored the story, as evidence of the Streisand Effect nearly doubling the attention the story received. Twitter removed the ban the following day.
Donald Trump's lawsuit of The Wall Street Journal for publishing a letter between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein has been described by some as causing a Streisand effect.
A study found that banned books in the United States grew in circulation by 12%, on average, compared with comparable nonbanned titles after the ban.
In September 2009, multi-national oil company Trafigura obtained in a British court a super-injunction to prevent The Guardian newspaper from reporting on an internal Trafigura investigation into the 2006 Ivory Coast toxic waste dump scandal. A super-injunction prevents reporting on even the existence of the injunction. Using parliamentary privilege, Labour MP Paul Farrelly referred to the super-injunction in a parliamentary question and on October 12, 2009, The Guardian reported that it had been gagged from reporting on the parliamentary question, in violation of the Bill of Rights 1689. Blogger Richard Wilson correctly identified the blocked question as referring to the Trafigura waste dump scandal, after which The Spectator suggested the same. Not long after, Trafigura began trending on Twitter, helped along by Stephen Fry's retweeting the story to his followers. Twitter users soon tracked down all details of the case, and by October 16, the super-injunction had been lifted and the report published.
On March 11, 2025, the book by Sarah Wynn-Williams was published. It details the author’s experiences working at Facebook (now Meta Platforms) and explores the company’s internal culture, decision-making processes, and role in reshaping global events. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded by seeking relief at the Emergency International Arbitral Tribunal, which enjoined Wynn-Williams "from making orally, in writing, or otherwise any disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments to any person or entity concerning Meta, its officers, directors, or employees". Macmillan, the UK publisher, later issued a statement saying that it would ignore the ruling. The book reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list by 20 March 2025. Meta described the book as "a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about its executives".
On December 5, 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) added the English Wikipedia article about the 1976 Scorpions album Virgin Killer to a child pornography blacklist, considering the album's cover art "a potentially illegal indecent image of a child under the age of 18". The article quickly became one of the most popular pages on the site, and the publicity surrounding the IWF action resulted in the image being spread across other sites. The IWF was later reported on the BBC News website to have said "IWF's overriding objective is to minimise the availability of indecent images of children on the Internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect". This effect was also noted by the IWF in its statement about the removal of the URL from the blacklist.
In 2013, a BuzzFeed article showcasing photos from the Super Bowl contained several photos of Beyoncé making unflattering poses and faces, resulting in her publicist contacting BuzzFeed via email and requesting the removal of the images. In response to the email, BuzzFeed republished the images, which subsequently became much more well-known across the internet.
In December 2022, Twitter CEO Elon Musk banned the Twitter account @elonjet, a bot that reported his private jet's movements based on public domain flight data, citing concerns about his family's safety. The ban drew further media coverage and public attention to Musk's comments on allowing free speech across the Twitter platform. Musk received further criticism after banning several journalists who had referred to the "ElonJet" account or been critical of Musk in the past.
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