List of Streisand effect examples

This is a list of notable incidents that have experienced a Streisand effect, an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove, or censor information, where the effort instead backfires by increasing public awareness of the information.

Argentina
In January 2024, Argentine politician Gerardo Morales had two men jailed for more than a month for tweeting rumors about his wife having an affair. This led to these rumors becoming trending nationally.

Australia
In March 2022, incumbent Australian federal MP Tim Wilson, in what had previously been considered to be the safe seat of Goldstein, drew national attention to his independent challenger Zoe Daniel when he made legal objections to posting of campaign signs by volunteers on the fences of private residences. This also led to a significant increase in donations to the Daniel campaign. .

In May 2024, Australia's richest billionaire Gina Rinehart demanded that the National Gallery of Australia remove a unflattering caricature of herself painted by Aboriginal Australian artist Vincent Namatjira. Rinehart pressured 20 Australian swimmers she was sponsoring to lobby for the removal. Her actions was covered by many news outlets and brought new audiences to Namatjira's art.

Canada
In December 2023, the Canadian Armed Forces at CFB Kingston sent a base wide email addressing a sex worker advertising on base. The worker who was essentially unknown to most soldiers at the time became instantly recognizable as the email advertised the woman and her services to the entire base. This situation was compounded after the story appeared in a number of national news outlets.

China
A 2018 study of millions of individual responses of Chinese social media users found that sudden censorship of information by the Chinese government and its affiliates often led to mass backlashes, including newfound popularity of virtual private networks and the subsequent reviewing of entire topic lists on which censored subjects appear. Other researchers found that the backlash tended to result in permanent changes to political attitudes and behaviors.

In August 2020, it was reported that the Chinese government had blanked out parts of Baidu's mapping platform, and that this could be used to find a network of buildings bearing hallmarks of prisons and internment camps.

On June 3, 2022, Chinese streamer Li Jiaqi was interrupted for showing a tank-shaped ice cream in the livestream and failed to show up for the next scheduled show. This sudden suspension drew more attention to the sensitivity of the tank symbol, alluding to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre.

In January 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic in China, the Jyllands-Posten newspaper received international attention when it published a cartoon depicting the Chinese flag with yellow virus-like figures instead of the usual yellow stars. The illustrator received numerous threats, and social media platforms were flooded by illustrations of the Danish flag that had been edited to included feces, texts like alle jeres familier døde ("all your families are dead") and similar mockery in what experts regarded as a coordinated action, much of it spread by newly started profiles that appeared to be automated. The Chinese embassy in Denmark demanded an official apology from Jyllands-Posten. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen refused to apologize on behalf of the Danish government, declaring that there is freedom of speech in Denmark. Other Danish newspapers, although some of them regarded the illustration as impolite, supported Jyllands-Posten, noting that Danish newspapers operate under Danish law, not based on intimidation from a non-democratic country, and also pointed out that few would have seen the illustration if not for the actions of the Chinese embassy.

When Hong Kong's secretary for justice filed an injunction to bar the distribution of pro-democracy protest song Glory to Hong Kong with the intention to incite secession, sedition, or to violate the national anthem law, Senior Counsel Abraham Chan said the government's injunction application "would bring about an own goal" by amplifying that which it sought to prohibit. Chan cited "empirical evidence" that after the government announced that it would apply for a ban, "the level of engagement with the song increased".

When Liu Xiaobo was awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize for "his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China", the Chinese Communist Party censored the news domestically, while publicly denouncing the Nobel Prize internationally. Most Western democracies, however, publicly praised the award and attended the awards ceremony despite pressure from Chinese diplomats.

When tennis star Peng Shuai disappeared after accusing Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli of raping her, the Chinese Communist Party's censorship of her story and subsequent staged public appearances of Peng drew increased worldwide scrutiny to her whereabouts and safety.

France
The French intelligence agency DCRI's attempt to delete the French Wikipedia article about the military radio station of Pierre-sur-Haute resulted in the restored article temporarily becoming the most-viewed page on the French Wikipedia.

Greece
A 2013 libel suit by Greek politician Theodore Katsanevas against a Greek Wikipedia editor resulted in members of the project bringing the story to the attention of journalists.

India
In February 2023, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India sought to ban India: The Modi Question, a BBC documentary that was critical of him. This led to students in colleges across India screening the documentary on their own, on campus and elsewhere.

Israel
In May 2009, the Israeli right-wing nationalist political party Yisrael Beiteinu introduced a bill that would outlaw all commemorations of the expulsion of Palestinians following the Independence War, known as "Nakba", with a three-year prison sentence for such acts of remembrance. The original bill did not pass, and the controversy surrounding it unintentionally promoted knowledge of the Nakba within Israeli society.

Poland
In February 2018, Anne Applebaum wrote in The Washington Post about the Polish Holocaust law, which would have criminalized blaming Poles for the Holocaust. She argued that the Streisand effect would draw more attention to aspects of history that the Polish government preferred to suppress. The legislation is part of the historical policy of the Law and Justice party which seeks to present a narrative of ethnic Poles exclusively as victims and heroes. The law was met with widespread international criticism, as it was seen as an infringement on freedom of expression and on academic freedom, and as a barrier to open discussion on Polish collaborationism, in what has been described as "the biggest diplomatic crisis in [Poland's] recent history".

Saudi Arabia
A 2019 study of political imprisonment by the government of Saudi Arabia found that while the incarceration tended to deter individual dissidents from further dissent, it strongly emboldened their social media followers, led to a sharp increase in calls for political reform, and resulted in an increase in online dissent and physical in-person protests overall, including criticism of the ruling family and calls for regime change. Such repression draws public attention to the imprisoned dissidents and their causes, and did not deter other prominent figures in Saudi Arabia from continuing to dissent online.

South Africa
In 2017, the government of South Africa stated their intention to ban a book by Jacques Pauw, The President's Keepers, detailing corruption within the government of then-President Jacob Zuma. This resulted in sales of the book skyrocketing, and it sold out within 24 hours before the ban was to be put into effect. The book became a national best seller and led to multiple reprints. This effect was repeated when Pauw published Our Poisoned Land (2023) and the Economic Freedom Fighters took legal action in an effort to ban the book, thereby resulting in an increase in book sales.

Tunisia
In November 2007, Tunisia blocked access to YouTube and Dailymotion after material was posted depicting Tunisian political prisoners. Activists and their supporters then started to link the location of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's palace on Google Earth to videos about civil liberties in general. The Economist said this "turned a low-key human-rights story into a fashionable global campaign".

United States
In March 2019, US Representative (Calif.) Devin Nunes filed a defamation lawsuit against Twitter and three users for US$250 million in damages. One user named in the lawsuit, the parody account @DevinCow (Name: Devin Nunes' cow), had 1,200 followers before the lawsuit. After the suit, however, @DevinCow had gained some 600,000 additional followers.

In October 2020, the New York Post published emails from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, detailing an alleged corruption scheme. After internal discussion that debated whether the story may have originated from Russian misinformation and propaganda, Twitter blocked the story from their platform and locked the accounts of those who shared a link to the article, including the New York Post own Twitter account, and White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, among others. Researchers at MIT cited the increase of 5,500 shares every 15 minutes to about 10,000 shares shortly after Twitter censored the story, as evidence of the Streisand effect nearly doubling the attention the story received. Twitter removed the ban the following day.

In June 2023, the city of Durham, North Carolina, sent a letter to Wikimedia Foundation seeking to determine the identities of three users who posted "accurate but unfavorable" information on the Wikipedia pages of Mayor Elaine O'Neal and city council members DeDreana Freeman and Monique Holsey-Hyman. The day after Indy Week published an article about the letter, traffic to the trio's Wikipedia pages increased by 50 to 70 times what it was the day before the article.

United Kingdom
On June 18, 2022, The Times reported claims that Boris Johnson had tried to hire his now-wife Carrie Symonds as his chief of staff when he was foreign secretary. Although it was published on its first printed edition, it was then swiftly removed without explanation. It was also mentioned on MailOnline, who rewrote the Times story in the early hours of the morning before also deleting its article without explanation or an editor's note. Rival newspaper The Guardian mentioned that this incident could backfire as an example of the Streisand effect. A few days later on June 21, 10 Downing Street said that the prime minister's special advisers asked The Times to retract the article, leading to questions about the objectivity of the editorship of the newspaper.

By businesses
In April 2007, a group of companies that used Advanced Access Content System (AACS) encryption issued cease-and-desist letters demanding that the system's 128-bit (16-byte) numerical key (represented in hexadecimal as 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0) be removed from several high-profile websites, including Digg. With the numerical key and some software, it was possible to decrypt the video content on HD-DVDs. This led to the key's proliferation across other sites and chat rooms in various formats, with one commentator describing it as having become "the most famous number on the Internet". Within a month, the key had been reprinted on over 280,000 pages, had been printed on T-shirts and tattoos, had been published as a book, and had appeared on YouTube in a song played over 45,000 times.

In September 2009, multi-national oil company Trafigura obtained a super-injunction to prevent The Guardian newspaper from reporting on an internal Trafigura investigation into the 2006 Ivory Coast toxic waste dump scandal. A super-injunction prevents reporting on even the existence of the injunction. Using parliamentary privilege, Labour MP Paul Farrelly referred to the super-injunction in a parliamentary question and on October 12, 2009, The Guardian reported that it had been gagged from reporting on the parliamentary question, in violation of the Bill of Rights 1689. Blogger Richard Wilson correctly identified the blocked question as referring to the Trafigura waste dump scandal, after which The Spectator suggested the same. Not long after, Trafigura began trending on Twitter, helped along by Stephen Fry's retweeting the story to his followers. Twitter users soon tracked down all details of the case, and by October 16, the super-injunction had been lifted and the report published.

In November 2012, Casey Movers, a Boston moving company, threatened to sue a woman in Hingham District Court for libel in response to a negative Yelp review. The woman's husband wrote a blog post about the situation, which was then picked up by Techdirt and Consumerist. By the end of the week, the company was reviewed by the Better Business Bureau, which later revoked its accreditation.

In December 2013, YouTube user ghostlyrich uploaded video proof that his Samsung Galaxy S4 battery had spontaneously caught fire. Samsung had demanded proof before honoring its warranty. Once Samsung learned of the YouTube video, it added additional conditions to its warranty, demanding ghostlyrich delete his YouTube video, promise not to upload similar material, officially absolve the company of all liability, waive his right to bring a lawsuit, and never make the terms of the agreement public. Samsung also demanded that a witness cosign the settlement proposal. When ghostlyrich shared Samsung's settlement proposal online, his original video drew 1.2 million views in one week.

In September 2018, The Verge, an American technology news and media network operated by Vox Media, published an article titled "How to Build a Custom PC for Editing, Gaming or Coding" and uploaded a video to YouTube titled "How we Built a $2000 Custom Gaming PC", which was widely criticized for its instructions that would have been harmful or dangerous to both the computer and user if followed, and its numerous factual errors, such as claiming anti-vibration pads were for electrical insulation, and confusing zip ties with tweezers. In February 2019, Vox Media started issuing Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices to YouTube channels which posted content using clips from the video, most notably to technology channels Bitwit and ReviewTechUSA, bringing further attention to the video and the related content they attempted to suppress. After an outcry following the decision, YouTube reinstated these two videos, along with retracting the copyright "strikes" applied.

On February 20, 2020, Apple filed a legal complaint against the sales of the German-language book App Store Confidential, written by a former German App Store manager, Tom Sadowski. Apple cited confidential business information as the reason for requesting the sales ban. However, the publicity brought on by the media caused the book to reach number two on the Amazon bestseller list in Germany. The book was soon on its second print run.

In October 2020, the RIAA filed a DMCA takedown against the youtube-dl repository on GitHub, resulting in the repository and several forks being taken down. However, over 100 forks of the original repository appeared on GitHub in the days following the takedown request.

In May 2023, Nintendo issued a cease-and-desist notice against the Dolphin emulator appearing on Steam. As a result, Google searches of the emulator surged.

In November 2023, PR agency Mogul Press issued a DMCA takedown notice against a blog post by investigative journalist and tax lawyer Dan Neidle which contained commentary that was critical of their business practices. At the time of writing the resulting Twitter threads highlighting Mogul Press' actions have been viewed over 400,000 times (combined).

By other organizations
In January 2008, The Church of Scientology's attempts to get Internet websites to delete a video of Tom Cruise speaking about Scientology resulted in the creation of Project Chanology.

On December 5, 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) added the English Wikipedia article about the 1976 Scorpions album Virgin Killer to a child pornography blacklist, considering the album's cover art "a potentially illegal indecent image of a child under the age of 18". The article quickly became one of the most popular pages on the site, and the publicity surrounding the IWF action resulted in the image being spread across other sites. The IWF was later reported on the BBC News website to have said "IWF's overriding objective is to minimise the availability of indecent images of children on the Internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect". This effect was also noted by the IWF in its statement about the removal of the URL from the blacklist.

In June 2012, Argyll and Bute Council in Scotland banned a nine-year-old primary school pupil from updating her blog, NeverSeconds, with photos of lunchtime meals served in the school's canteen. The blog, which was already popular, started receiving a large number of views due to the international media furor that followed the ban. Within days, the council reversed its decision under immense public pressure and scrutiny. After the reversal of the ban, the blog became more popular than it was before.

In September 2022, after an upset loss to Appalachian State, clips of Texas A&M's Midnight Yell Practice started trending on the internet. The clips featured quotes including "What's [sic] are the best 4 years of an Appalachian State Mountaineers [sic] life? The third grade!" along with "I know for a fact that half their football team can barely read the name of their jerseys, let alone read a map." Texas A&M filed several DMCA strikes on several platforms of the clips online, however with the clips being continually taken down and reuploaded, the clips became even more popular.

By individuals
The Streisand effect has been observed in relation to the right to be forgotten, the right in some jurisdictions to have private information about a person removed from internet searches and other directories under some circumstances, as a litigant attempting to remove information from search engines risks the litigation itself being reported as valid, current news.

In May 2011, Premier League footballer Ryan Giggs sued Twitter after a user revealed that Giggs was the subject of an anonymous privacy injunction (informally referred to as a "super-injunction" ) that prevented the publication of details regarding an alleged affair with model and former Big Brother contestant Imogen Thomas. A blogger for the Forbes website observed that the British media, which were banned from breaking the terms of the injunction, had mocked the footballer for not understanding the effect. Dan Sabbagh from The Guardian subsequently posted a graph detailing—without naming the player—the number of references to the player's name against time, showing a large spike following the news that the player was seeking legal action.

Similar situations involving super-injunctions in England and Wales have occurred, one involving Jeremy Clarkson. Since January 2016 a celebrity (later revealed outside England and Wales to be David Furnish) used the injunction granted in PJS v News Group Newspapers to prevent media in England and Wales reporting events that have been featured in Scottish media and on the Internet.

In May 2016, Guns N' Roses singer Axl Rose sent a series of DMCA takedown notices to Google, in an attempt to suppress a 2010 image of him that was taken by a Winnipeg Free Press photographer and reposted by Gauntlet, under the headline "OMFG Axl Rose is Fat." This resulted in the "Fat Axl Rose" meme gaining a spike in popularity.

In 2018, Philippine Senate President Tito Sotto requested the Philippine Daily Inquirer to take down three of its online news articles published in 2014 that reported on the gang rape case of 15-year-old actress Pepsi Paloma in 1982. The articles stated that Sotto had intimidated Paloma to drop the case and used his political connections to influence the outcome of the rape case, of which his brother Vic Sotto was among the suspects involved. Tito Sotto alleged in his letter to the Inquirer that the articles "maliciously linked" him to the rape case and "negatively affected" his reputation "for the longest time". In response, links to the articles were mass-shared and archived into posts on Facebook and Twitter to preserve them and sparked renewed public interest into the Pepsi Paloma rape case. Eventually, a month after the request was made, the Inquirer complied with Sotto's request, with links to the former articles now redirecting to the Inquirer's home page.

A satirical play, Two Brothers and the Lions, was written by French playwright Hédi Tillette de Clermont-Tonnerre, about two wealthy British people who live in a castle on the Channel Island of Brecqhou, "who become cold, selfish monsters in the heart of our democratic societies". In reality the billionaire Barclay brothers, owners of the Daily Telegraph newspaper among other holdings, live in a castle on the island. David Barclay sued the playwright in France for defamation and invasion of privacy, though the Barclays were not named in the play. The playwright's lawyer described the play as "a satirical fable on capitalism". Tillette de Clermont-Tonnerre acknowledged that the play was partly inspired by the lives of the brothers. But he said it fell within his right to freedom of expression and said the play had been commissioned to explore the issue of the existence of mediaeval Norman law in the Channel Islands, while ruminating on the nature and future of capitalism. In July 2019 Barclay lost the case. The play had been obscure and only played in small theatres, though critically acclaimed; after the lawsuit performances were scheduled in cities across France.

News media reported about Fred Goodwin's extra-marital affair with a colleague at the Royal Bank of Scotland Group (RBS) where he had previously served as chief executive, so in response Goodwin filed a super-injunction to protect the identity of his former mistress.

Luke O'Neill, an Irish immunologist writing in The Guardian, opined that Bret Stephens, an American Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative journalist, in 2019 achieved "as close to the perfect Streisand effect as one could imagine." Stephens wrote an e-mail to David Karpf, an associate professor of media and public affairs at The George Washington University, whose tweet calling Stephens a "bedbug" had attracted insignificant interest, saying "I'm often amazed about the things supposedly decent people are prepared to say about other people — people they've never met — on Twitter. I think you've set a new standard." The journalist cc'd on the e-mail the George Washington University provost. Karpf retaliated against Stephens, by posting the e-mail publicly on Twitter and by writing an op-ed criticizing him in the Los Angeles Times. Stephens was mocked on Twitter and deleted his account there, and the story was picked up by media.

In 2019 author Andrew Seidel sent a copy of his book The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American to conservative evangelical pastor Greg Locke in the hope of starting a conversation about the issues discussed in it. Locke said that he had no intention of reading the book, and burnt it, posting video of the burning on his social media accounts. Response to the video included many replies expressing the intention to purchase and read the book, and to donate copies to libraries.

In November 2022, TV host Pablo Motos took offence in the wake of a Spanish Ministry of Equality TV promo that used an actor to play a male TV host asking a female guest about the kind of clothing she wore to sleep (echoing a similar situation involving Motos and actress Elsa Pataky in El Hormiguero), in order to denounce sexist attitudes women face on a daily basis. Motos invested 10 minutes of his show to criticise the promo and tell audiences that he is not machista (thus promoting, in prime time, an ad that presumably would have gone relatively unnoticed otherwise), Twitter users shared videos highlighting sexist attitudes by Motos in his show, Motos reportedly tried to take them down via copyright infringement notices from his production company, and they became viral.

In December 2022, Twitter CEO Elon Musk banned the Twitter account @elonjet, a bot that reported his private jet's movements based on public domain flight data. Musk had cited concerns about his personal privacy. The ban drew further media coverage and public attention to Musk's comments on allowing free speech across the Twitter platform. Musk received further criticism after banning several journalists who had referred to the "ElonJet" account or been critical of Musk in the past.

On 19 January 2024, a piano player Brenden Kavanagh, who films himself playing public and freely accessible pianos in London, was interrupted by a group of six holding Chinese flags, saying that he could not record their faces as they were for "Chinese TV". Kavanagh uploaded a clip of the encounter to YouTube, which has received 10 million views as of May 2024.

In March 2024, after an anti-fascist vigilante account on X (formerly Twitter) posted a thread and blog post allegedly exposing the identity of neo-Nazi cartoonist StoneToss, StoneToss made a tweet directly appealing Musk to remove the thread allegedly identifying him. Subsequently, the thread was removed and the account that posted it was suspended; the removal led to numerous users amplifying StoneToss's alleged identity, with many of these tweets, as well as links to the original poster's blog post, being removed and leading to some account suspensions. Commentators including Alejandra Caraballo, whose account was among those temporarily suspended for posting StoneToss's alleged identity, and Rob Beschizza in an article for Boing Boing, referred to the incident as an example of the Streisand effect. After the bans, X updated its privacy policy to include identifying anonymous users as a violation of its policies.

In March 2024, author J. K. Rowling was criticised for comments that denied that transgender people were targeted in Nazi Germany, which several users, including Jewish Novara Media journalist Rivkah Brown, described as Holocaust denial; Rowling replied specifically to Brown threatening litigation. Several weeks later, Brown deleted the criticism and issued an apology to Rowling, which caused the phrase "J.K. Rowling is a Holocaust denier" to become a trending topic on X, which Mira Fox of the Jewish newspaper The Forward compared directly to Streisand's lawsuit.

In March 2024, mining heiress Gina Rinehart asked the National Gallery of Australia that two different portraits by artist Vincent Namatjira be removed from public display, reportedly taking offense at her depiction in one portrait. Kyle Chalmers, an Australian competitive swimmer, who is sponsored by Gina Rinehart, also requested and commented publicly to have a portrait removed. The efforts to remove the paintings from public exhibition resulted in the portraits gaining international media attention.