The social media is like bomb of information. When somebody wants to hide or suppress information it explodes all the more. How information moves on social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, has become a commanding factor in protest movements, national elections, and the rise and fall of commercial brands. Yes, people are hooked on to their social media accounts; they are getting information whether important or not so important. People on social platforms divulge massive amounts of information about themselves, their relatives and their friends.
That’s where the Streisand effect comes from: it is a social phenomenon that occurs when someone tries to attempt to hide, remove, or censor information – this act gets ripple effect of further publicizing that information, often via the Internet. It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand who attempted to suppress photographs of her residence in Malibu, California which unintentionally drew further attention to it in 2003. By trying to suppress the images, she caused a different outcome. When she tried to take legal action, it infuriated her fans, almost half a million people visiting the Pictopia (Internet’s super photo lab and photo commerce site) and viewing and copying the photos of her residence within a month. The term ‘’Streisand effect’’ was coined by Mike Masnick of Techdirt.com, who noted how feeble lawsuits were at preventing spread in the virtual world.
The problem for anyone trying to suppress information is that the internet is the world’s biggest and most efficient copying machine. Put a document on to a connected machine and it will proliferate. The irony of the internet is that when you want to be famous you can’t, but if you find yourself in the spotlight and want to erase yourself, you cannot. The evidences linger on.
In June 2014, taxi drivers rallied on the streets of Central London to express their opposition towards Uber, an app that makes use of a Smartphone’s GPS feature to locate where you are and connect you to a driver. The app was just slowly becoming popular in major European cities. The protest proved to be not just a failure, but it also brought the issue straight towards the Streisand Effect. Uber reported that it received an 859% increase in downloads compared to the previous week. The app also received the most-signed-ups since its release in 2012.
Another example is when North Korea heard that Sony was releasing a movie about Kim Jong-Un, they couldn’t leave it alone. The country became angry when a GIF of the scene showing the death of the dictator was leaked online. Out of nowhere, Sony’s corporate emails were leaked, which opened up a controversy involving Barack Obama. The hackers tried to stop ‘The Interview’ from showing in theatres by making a bombing threat if major cinemas screened the film. Fearing for the safety of the moviegoers, most theatres decided not to screen ‘The Interview’.
Sony itself pulled the film but later announced that it would be available online. Several independent theatres, including one owned by George R. Martin decided to show it. The Interview hit computers and indie theatres on Christmas, and people were very eager to see what the suppressed movie was all about. Major publications like the New York Times gave negative reviews, but discussed their motivations in seeing the movie to support freedom of speech and find out what the fuss was all about.
The fact is that when people find content which they think should not be suppressed; they will copy it and put it on the net. The replication becomes impossible to hold back because any time a web server gains a new file and is queried by the search engines’ “spiders” which go out looking to see what has changed on the web – the cache of the web is updated, with the location of the new file. As soon as it crosses national boundaries removal of a file becomes a full-time job. The real enemy of censorship is digitisation.
This is the reason most seasoned digital strategists now rely on education, behaviour change and a focus on ethical consumption, rather than suppression, censorship, or removal of data online. Any attempt at trying to govern and regulate digital content is futile. Attempts to exercise old-fashioned power on the new, flattened domains of the internet are only met with mockery and resistance.
In 2019 after Michael Wolff published Fire and Fury, the epic, sales-smashing, unforgiving gossip-dump depicting the can’t-make-this-stuff-up chaos and confusion of the Trump administration, the conventional wisdom was that Wolff wouldn’t be able to pull off another White House tell-all book of photographs “Fire and Fury’’, which has reportedly sold more than 4 million copies to date, was simply too non-improvisational, too explosive, too scandalous for any sources to be willing to talk to Wolff again. Surely he’d burned all of his bridges, the thinking went. Donald Trump decided that the correct response to Michael Wolff’s book is an attempt to censor it. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Even before Trump had made his decision, the book was being billed as an explosive one. The excerpts from the book had already irked media and reader curiosity. Once the initial hype around the book had receded, the book would probably have receded in public memory as well. It would, very likely, have been replaced by something else that catches our attention with every click. However, Trump’s attempt at trying to restrict the book’s publication has now ensured that a wide range of people, who might have heard of the book but never intended to read it, are now on their way to devouring it.
The book sold out on Amazon on the day of its release, and people had to wait to get the copy for almost two weeks, as the pre-order list was huge, full of potential readers. The websites showed thousands of reviewers, who said that the only reason they came to buy the book was because the president of the USA tried to stop it. This is an incredible example of Streisand effect.
This is the latest in a list of examples of the Streisand effect in India, where an attempt to suppress something has the unintended effect of publicising it more widely. Comedian Tanmay Bhat on Snapchat, who is not very popular in India, except among teenagers, was having a bit of a boring day and decided to enliven it for himself by making a Snapchat video called “Sachin v/s Lata Civil War”. He superimposed the faces of Tendulkar and Mangeshkar to create a supposed dialogue between the two about the possible superiority of Virat Kohli as a batsman. Predictably, the video was peppered with swear words and curse words.
Riteish Deshmukh was a first to come out in protest by saying the video was in poor taste. Our politicians promptly weighed right in too: Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) filed a complaint with the Mumbai Police and BJP legislator Ashish Shelar wanted to register a complaint under a non-bailable provision of the IPC. Various people have called for ban and removal of the video from YouTube and other social media platforms. Arnab Goswami for a change did a debate on the matter as did every journo worth their salt. “Roast wale din yaad aa gaye by god” tweeted Tanmay.
But that isn’t even the point. The fact that entire TV debates were dedicated to this silly video, the who’s who of the Twitterati had their take on it, political parties were up in arms against it, suddenly the whole nation knew who Tanmay Bhat was and his rather mediocre video had attained worldwide fame.
