Australian Government set to discover the “Streisand effect”
It’s surprising that there are still some policy-makers out there who haven’t heard about the Streisand Effect. The Streisand Effect is an emerging phenomenon on the Internet, where attempts to suppress certain content – most commonly by legal intimidation – backfire and result in much greater publicity for the content in question (in fact, it’s ...
It's surprising that there are still some policy-makers out there who haven't heard about the Streisand Effect. The Streisand Effect is an emerging phenomenon on the Internet, where attempts to suppress certain content - most commonly by legal intimidation - backfire and result in much greater publicity for the content in question (in fact, it's simply a fancier way of stating the Law of Unintended Consequences). The list of people and organizations who have fallen victim to the Streisand Effect is surprisingly long and growing, includes a disproportionate number of celebrities and VIPs (in fact, it was Barbara Streisand's legal efforts to suppress the publication of the photos of her Malibu house which gave name to the whole phenomenon). The most prominent among them are the Church of Scientology, the Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov, the King of Thailand, and even the Internet Watch Foundation (which, supposedly, wasn't watching the Internet close enough).
The Australian government (its Australian Communications and Media Authority to be more precise) might be set to be the next victim of the Streisand Effect. In an undoubtedly well-intentioned move, they decided to block access to several pages hosted by Wikileaks, a self-described Wikipedia for leaked documents. One of such pages happens to be a list of web-sites (with URLs) banned by the Danish authorities; quite predictably, the list includes many pornographic web-sites. The Australians must have decided that access to such a list may make the discovery of such web-sites much easier – so they blocked access to it (even linking to banned content may get you in trouble with the local authorities; one of the Internet forums was even threatened with a fine of $11,000 a day for linking to graphic pictures from an anti-abortion web-site).
The problem with this approach is that banning the Wikileaks list is only going to raise interest in its contents. After all, one just has to ask a friend outside of Australia to download the list and send it via email. The best way to keep the wider public from discovering and exploring the banned links is to keep silent about them; the Australian government, on the contrary, committed a major media blunder, which is now being discussed in countless blog posts and news articles. Too bad that they didn’t heed the lessons of the Internet Watch Foundation, which temporarily managed to block access to a Wikipedia page containing some graphic materials: interest in that page skyrocketed immediately after the blocking. IWF, at least, acknowledged that its ban had the reverse effect.
Photo by Euthman/Flickr
More from Foreign Policy


Saudi-Iranian Détente Is a Wake-Up Call for America
The peace plan is a big deal—and it’s no accident that China brokered it.


The U.S.-Israel Relationship No Longer Makes Sense
If Israel and its supporters want the country to continue receiving U.S. largesse, they will need to come up with a new narrative.


Putin Is Trapped in the Sunk-Cost Fallacy of War
Moscow is grasping for meaning in a meaningless invasion.


How China’s Saudi-Iran Deal Can Serve U.S. Interests
And why there’s less to Beijing’s diplomatic breakthrough than meets the eye.