The Streisand effect – you can’t hide things

Over twenty years ago, a photographer took a few thousand aerial photos of the California coast. This work was part of the California Coastal Records Project, an initiative to document the state’s shoreline for conservation and other purposes.

In California, like many other places, lots of rich and famous people live on the waterfront. In 2003, one of them – singer and actress Barbra Streisand – found their home in that database of photos and didn’t like it.

Photo 3850, which featured her sprawling estate, was an invasion of privacy, she claimed. She didn’t want anybody to see it, so she filed a $50 million lawsuit to have it taken down.

Well, because of that lawsuit, a whole lot of people saw that photo. According to news at the time, more than 420,000 people took a look in the weeks that followed.

Deep in a database, nobody was looking at this image before, but now it became infamous. By trying to hide something, she instead brought attention to it. This has become known as the Streisand effect.

Forcefully trying to keep something under the radar will backfire. In 2013, Beyoncé tried to get unflattering photos of her from the Super Bowl taken down – which then became memes. When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he banned @elonjet, an account that tracked the public movements of his private jet, which turned into a multi-day media story.

And just this month, Meta has been forcefully but unsuccessfully trying to block the publication of an ex-employee’s memoir. As a result, Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Careless People is, as of this writing, the #4 best-selling book on all of Amazon.

If Meta had simply ignored it, this book would have likely been just another moderately successful tech tell-all. I bet Wynn-Williams would have done a couple of good interviews on NPR or The Daily Show. We’d probably see the book on a few industry-focused few year-end roundups. Maybe you’d pick it up in the airport bookstore if you had some time to kill before a flight.

But now, like countless others, I just went out of my way to order my copy. The thought in my head, and the thought behind every Streisand effect, is this: What are they trying to hide so badly?