The Streisand effect is a popular adage that suggests the attempts to censor information will energize the public to consume that heretical material in greater numbers than if the information was left alone.
If I ran the CIA's division on pacifying a population using non-lethal cognitive weaponry, I would push for as many people as possible to learn of the Streisand effect.
For one, it's an example of the survivorship bias. We will add another item this year to the Wikipedia list of Streisand effect examples and never consider the high volume of stories that were successfully censored. Does anyone really believe that marketing firms have gotten weaker since 2003? What about law enforcement successfully hiding mass shooter manifestos from the public?
List of Streisand effect examples - Wikipedia
Secondly, it's not going to break through the short-term memory that modern culture is defined by. You can more easily remember the news of today than yesterday. Even the news you were never supposed to forget...
...Did you think about Kony 2012 this month? The very successful marketing strategy of Kony 2012 was the call to action (CTA) that suggested global awareness of the warlord Joseph Kony would lead to his arrest. That helped it to become the first video on YouTube to get 1 million likes, it gaining over 100 million views, the activist's site going down briefly from excess traffic, and people even handing our flyers and putting stickers on things in public places across the globe (the first world, mostly). As of 2024, Joseph Kony is still at large.
There was no Streisand effect for Kony, since Joseph Kony likely never attempted to censor anyone through legal cease and desist notices nor pay any money to marketing firms to improve his abysmal global reputation. Yet he walked away unscathed from the one-sided character assassination. But we're supposed to believe that people will do some real lasting activism when the bad guy actually does get lawyers and marketers on his side?
Also, Barbra Streisand hasn't been in a movie since 2012, hasn't toured since 2017, and her last album was in 2018. Wouldn't it be nice of us to stop looking at that mansion photo of hers from 2003? It's the only example of the Streisand effect that is actually timeless, yet holds no political importance we'd need to remember.
Streisand's 2003 mansion photo (you know you want to look at it again)
