{"id":2573,"date":"2026-10-08T16:31:25","date_gmt":"2026-10-08T14:31:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nitida.ai\/?p=2573"},"modified":"2026-10-09T20:29:24","modified_gmt":"2026-10-09T18:29:24","slug":"streisand-effect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nitida.ai\/en\/notes\/streisand-effect\/","title":{"rendered":"The Streisand effect: what it is and how to avoid it when you want content removed"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Streisand effect (also called the Barbra Streisand effect) is what happens when someone tries to hide or suppress a piece of information and ends up getting far more people to see it.<\/strong> It is real, but it is the exception. Most content that is taken off the internet disappears without anyone noticing, which is why you have never heard of those cases.<\/p>\n

I have been removing content for more than ten years. At N\u00edtida AI, before we ask anyone to delete anything, we look at how the request is going to land with whoever receives it. Almost everything depends on that.<\/p>\n

What the Streisand effect means and where the name comes from<\/h2>\n

The name goes back to 2003, when Barbra Streisand sued a photographer who was documenting the erosion of the California coast from the air. One of his thousands of photos showed the singer’s house in Malibu. She asked for 50 million dollars and for the image to be taken down.<\/p>\n

Until that day the photo had been downloaded six times, two of them by her own lawyers. The following month it passed 420,000 visits. Streisand lost the case and had to pay the photographer’s legal costs. Mike Masnick gave it the name in 2005, on the blog Techdirt, and it has stuck for any attempt to cover something up that ends up advertising it.<\/p>\n

Examples of the Streisand effect<\/h2>\n

In Britain, the case people remember is Trafigura. In October 2009 the oil trader’s lawyers told The Guardian<\/em> that it could not report a question an MP had tabled in Parliament about a report on toxic waste dumped in Ivory Coast. The paper published the only thing it was allowed to: that it had been stopped from reporting Parliament. Within hours, bloggers and Twitter users had found the question and were passing the company’s name around. By lunchtime the next day the lawyers had backed down.<\/p>\n

In France it happened to the intelligence service. In April 2013 the DCRI, the domestic intelligence agency, summoned a volunteer administrator of French Wikipedia and made him delete an article about a military radio station, under threat of being held in custody. The article had been online since 2009 with hardly any readers. Another editor restored it from Switzerland, and that weekend it was the most-read page on French Wikipedia.<\/p>\n

And it doesn’t take a court or a threat. In 2013, after the Super Bowl, Beyonc\u00e9’s publicist asked BuzzFeed to swap some photos in which she didn’t look her best. It was a polite email. BuzzFeed published the email, and the photos ended up as memes.<\/p>\n

The most recent one is a book. In March 2025 Meta obtained an emergency arbitration order barring a former employee from promoting Careless People<\/em>, her memoir about the company. The order did not bind the publisher, which kept selling it. The book sold 60,000 copies in its first week.<\/p>\n

There is one more that is close to home, because my profession comes out of it. A Spanish citizen asked Google to stop showing, when his name was searched, two notices that the newspaper La Vanguardia<\/em> had published in 1998 about the auction of a property over social security debts. He won. The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in his favour in 2014, and that judgment is the source of the right to be forgotten that anyone can use today. But the judgment tells his story, and anyone who studies the right to be forgotten starts by reading about that auction. I am not going to put his name here.<\/p>\n

Why the Streisand effect happens<\/h2>\n

A removal doesn’t draw attention. What draws attention is the attempt, when there is a story in it. It takes someone who wants to tell it, usually the author or a community that sees the request as proof it was right. And it takes something that can be shown, like a lawsuit or the removal request itself. If people are already following the matter, it goes viral.<\/p>\n

When those things aren’t there, which is the norm, the content comes down and nobody notices.<\/p>\n

When asking for removal makes it worse<\/h2>\n

Our first option is always to remove the content from the website where it is published, because that is the only thing that takes it down everywhere. And asking for removal doesn’t mean writing to the author: there is almost never just one party to go to.<\/p>\n

But there are cases where it isn’t worth trying, and you can usually see them coming. We don’t look only at the page. We look at the whole situation:<\/p>\n