by Brad Cohen :: @supnah
The Streisand Effect is a term that refers to an event where an individual or organization attempts to censor, inhibit, or otherwise block access to information on the Web, and subsequently the attempt to block the information foments and increases the interest in the information to a massive degree. The end result is that the involvement intended to block the spread of the information turns out to extend its reach, and ironically pushes the information to many many more people via the Web. And it is not a new idea. The term was originally coined by Mike Masnick in 2003 with regards to a lawsuit brought by Barbra Streisand to block a Web site from posting an aerial photo of her house. As explained in the Streisand Effect Wikipedia entry, Streisand:
…sued photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com for US$50 million in an attempt to have the aerial photo of her house removed from the publicly available collection of 12,000 California coastline photographs, citing privacy concerns. Adelman stated that he was photographing beachfront property to document coastal erosion as part of the California Coastal Records Project. As a result of the case, public knowledge of the picture increased substantially and it became popular on the Internet, with more than 420,000 people visiting the site over the next month.
Let’s review. The photo would have been essentially buried in a Web site within a collection of 12,000 other coastline photographs. On top of that, the number of people interested in Streisand’s house, or anything else having to do with Streisand when not involved in some kind of scandal is by no means zero, but it’s not massive either. However, when you add in a controversy - when the public learns that Barbra doesn’t want them to see the photo - well all of a sudden it’s interesting to significantly more people.
The Wikipedia entry goes on to report that the Streisand Effect is related to John Gilmore’s also famous observation that “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” When users interpret an action as attempted censorship, even with regards to a piece of information that is otherwise totally uninteresting to them, they will spend significant amounts of energy to seek out that information. There is a direct relationship between a user’s perception of how interesting a story is and how much someone wants them not to see it (but only when the users knows that someone is trying to prevent them from seeing it). The Web doesn’t just route around the damage of censorship, it goes further and punishes the censors by drawing even more traffic to the information.
One high profile case recently had to do with a libel suit brought against a Twitter user in Chicago who posted a message about her landlords, Horizon Group Management, and claimed their apartments (hers included) were moldy. No one but her small group of Twitter followers would have seen the message. Now it’s turned into a national news story, the profile of the plaintiff tenant has been raised immeasurably, and millions of people associate Horizon Group Management with moldy apartments. Additionally, you reading this have now heard this story, as the chain of propagation continues.
Other examples include:
- An attempted effort to force Web sites to remove a 16 digit key that unlocked Blu Ray encryption - most notably on digg.com. The story that would have otherwise come and gone, and only been of interest to people who knew what the key was and how to use, now drew the interest of many many more people who not only learned about the code, but also learned that it was possible to unlock Blu Ray discs. The action ended up educating a massive number of people about the existence of the codes and how to break the encryption on the discs.
- A successful suit by the Swiss bank Julius Baer where a judge ruled for a Web site to take down private documents. However, this relatively low-traffic site had its profile raised significantly, along with the message it was trying to push about the bank. It also spurred countless individuals to independently post versions of the documents to many more file sharing Web sites. In the end the distribution of the documents the bank sought to disrupt was magnified tremendously.
Sometimes it’s better to do nothing because any reaction will simply draw more attention to whatever it is you would like to keep hidden. This is an important lesson for anyone, but it is especially important for enterprise organizations to be cognizant of the danger simply because there are so many individual actors involved in an enterprise, and it is simply impossible, and often inadvisable, to attempt micro-manage messaging from every individual within the organization. A lot of the problem comes down to this question:
How many people in the organization have a basic understanding of viral marketing, memes, online communities, network theory, and/or social media?
If there are individuals with the authority to react to PR situations that occur online or offline, but who do not understand the complexity of these interactions, then there is serious danger of causing a Streisand Effect when bad news comes along. Ensure that people across all parts of the organization have been trained, or at least exposed to these ideas. Every employee doesn’t have to be an expert, but there should be enough people trained so that throughout the organization there are individuals capable of recommending a deep breath and a consultation with Web savvy counterparts before a reaction is issued on behalf of the organization.
Remember - the person issuing the response could occupy a relatively low-level post within the organization, but if the online community interprets the message as representative of the organization as a whole, then it’s not much different then if it were a message from a C level executive.
Last 5 posts by BradCohen
- Open Graph and SEO - April 27th, 2010
- Best Buy Twitter Commercial - TwelpForce - July 23rd, 2009
- Twitter URL Expansion Arrives at Last - July 18th, 2009
- Twitter Messaging - May 21st, 2009
- Wolfram Alpha and Google Squared - May 19th, 2009
Tags: brand, Censorship, Community, Engagement, Enterprise, PR, Public Relations, Social Media, Streisand Effect
