Streisand effect
noun
the unintended amplification of information caused by an attempt to suppress or remove it
What does Streisand effect mean?
The Streisand effect refers to when an effort to hide, censor, or remove a piece of information (such as a photo, a news story, a social media post) results in that information receiving far more attention than it ever would have on its own. Think of it as the Internet equivalent of telling someone not to think about a pink elephant.
Examples of Streisand effect
To recap, these Adam County Sheriff's deputies raided Afroman's house on a bogus tip and got mocked for it, sued Afroman for using his own surveillance footage to ridicule them, testified and cried in open court about how much Afroman's music videos hurt their feelings, and then lost. This is an incredible sequence of events, a truly Drake-like example of self-ownage and the Streisand effect.
—Yahoo! News, 19 Mar. 2026
Stephen Colbert Just Gave Brendan Carr a Free Lesson in the Streisand Effect
—The city had indeed put the code violation in effect against Tye, but the “Streisand effect” — so-named after celebrity Barbra Streisand’s one-time attempt to stop the release of a photograph taken of her California home backfired when the image exploded in attention — also had taken hold.
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Where does Streisand effect come from?
The term was coined in January 2005 by Mike Masnick, the founder of the technology blog Techdirt, in a post about a cease-and-desist letter to a website dedicated to photographs of public restrooms.
"How long is it going to take before lawyers realize that the simple act of trying to repress something they don't like online is likely to make it so that something that most people would never, ever see … is now seen by many more people? Let's call it the Streisand Effect."
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The Streisand, of course, refers to Barbra Streisand; legendary singer, actress, and, as it turns out, inadvertent patron saint of internet backfire. In May 2003, Streisand filed a $50 million lawsuit against photographer Kenneth Adelman, demanding the removal of an aerial image of her Malibu clifftop mansion from Adelman's California Coastal Records Project, a publicly available archive of over 12,000 photographs documenting coastal erosion along the California shoreline. The image in question, labeled "Image 3850," showed her sprawling compound as one small feature among miles of coastline. Before Streisand's lawsuit, the photo had been downloaded exactly six times (two of those downloads were by her own lawyers). Within a month of the suit being filed, the site had received more than 400,000 visitors, the photo had been republished by the Associated Press, and it had appeared in newspapers across the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and Asia. The lawsuit was dismissed.
How is Streisand effect used?
The term functions as a noun. It is frequently invoked by media commentators, public relations professionals, and legal scholars as a cautionary descriptor: a shorthand warning that heavy-handed attempts at censorship are likely to backfire.
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