Joachim Andersen

Accelerated Learning

The Streisand Effect: Why Hiding Something Makes It Spread

A tall statue hidden under a black silk drape tied with a red cord stands on a marble pedestal in an empty Italian piazza at night, while golden beams of light from windows and street lamps converge on it
The harder we try to hide something, the more light falls on it.


The Streisand Effect describes how trying to hide, remove or censor a piece of information often makes it spread much further than it would have if it had been left alone. The attempt to suppress something turns a detail nobody noticed into a story everybody wants to see.

The essence of The Streisand Effect is to ask: “Will trying to make this disappear draw more attention to it, than simply leaving it alone?”


Origin: Image 3850

In 2003, the photographer Kenneth Adelman was flying along the coast of California to document erosion for the California Coastal Records Project, a public archive of around 12,000 aerial photographs. One of them, labeled “Image 3850”, happened to show the clifftop estate of the singer Barbra Streisand in Malibu.

Streisand sued Adelman and the photo site Pictopia for $50 million to have the picture removed. Before the lawsuit, the image had been downloaded only six times, two of them by her own lawyers. Once the news of the lawsuit broke, more than 420,000 people visited the site in the following month. The case was dismissed, and Streisand was ordered to pay Adelman’s legal fees.

Two years later, in January 2005, Mike Masnick of Techdirt wrote about a resort that had sent a takedown notice to a small website about urinals for showing a photo of one of its restrooms. He wondered how long it would take lawyers to realize that such attempts only make things more visible, and suggested: “Let’s call it the Streisand Effect.”


Key Concepts

  • Forbidden Fruit
    In 1966, the American psychologist Jack Brehm described psychological reactance, the unpleasant feeling we get when someone threatens our freedom to do, see or think something. One way we restore that freedom is by wanting the forbidden thing even more. Telling people they aren’t allowed to see something is one of the most reliable ways to make them curious about it.

  • The Cover-Up Is the Story
    A legal threat, a deleted post or a banned book is news in itself. Journalists and bloggers who would never have written about the original information now have a conflict to report on, with a powerful side trying to silence a weaker one.

  • Copies Are Cheap
    Once something is online, anyone can save it, share it and post it again in seconds. Every attempt to remove one copy gives people a reason to make many more, and the effort needed to suppress it grows much faster than the effort needed to spread it.

  • It Isn’t Automatic
    In 2015, Sue Curry Jansen and Brian Martin described the Streisand Effect as a form of backfire. Censors usually reduce outrage by hiding the censorship, devaluing the target, reinterpreting events, using official channels or intimidating people, and the effect only happens when these tactics fail and enough people learn about the attempt and see it as unfair.


Some Examples

  • The Banned Spy Memoir
    In 1985, the British government tried to stop the publication of Spycatcher, the memoir of the former MI5 officer Peter Wright. It was banned in England, but it stayed on sale in Scotland and was published in Australia after the government lost its case there. Newspapers were gagged from reporting on it, and The Economist printed a blank space for its British readers with the words “the law is an ass”. The book sold more than two million copies, and in 1988 the Law Lords cleared it for sale, accepting that after so much publication abroad it no longer contained any secrets.

  • The Number That Couldn’t Be Deleted
    In 2007, the companies behind the AACS copy protection used on HD DVDs sent cease-and-desist letters to websites that had published a 32-digit key that could unlock it. When the news site Digg deleted posts containing the number, its users flooded the front page with it until the founder, Kevin Rose, gave up and said they would rather see Digg go down fighting. Within days, a Google search showed almost 700,000 pages with the key, and it appeared in songs, on T-shirts and even as tattoos.

  • The School Lunch Blog
    In 2012, nine-year-old Martha Payne in Lochgilphead, Scotland, started NeverSeconds, a blog where she photographed and rated her school dinners to raise money for the charity Mary’s Meals. After a newspaper headline mocked the dinner ladies, the local council banned her from taking photos in the school. The ban became international news, and the council reversed it the next day. Donations, which had been under £2,000, passed £40,000 within hours and later exceeded £140,000, many times her original goal of £7,000.

  • The Wikipedia Article on a Military Radio Station
    In 2013, the French intelligence agency DCRI wanted the French Wikipedia article on the military radio station of Pierre-sur-Haute deleted. When the Wikimedia Foundation refused, the agency summoned a volunteer administrator, Rémi Mathis, and pressured him to delete it. The article was quickly restored by another editor, and over that weekend it became the most-read page on French Wikipedia, with more than 120,000 views.


Applying The Streisand Effect

When I want to use this mental model, this is the simple process I follow:

  1. Ask Who Knows Today
    Before reacting to something unflattering, I ask how many people have actually seen it. Often the honest answer is very few, and the best response is to let it fade.

  2. Picture the Headline
    I ask what the story would look like if my attempt to remove it became public, because it usually does.

  3. Respond Instead of Remove
    If something false is spreading, I answer it openly with facts, correct it calmly or own the mistake. Explaining usually gets far less attention than suppressing.

  4. Use the Quiet Options
    When something really must come down, such as private data or a real threat, I prefer polite, private requests over public legal threats, and I accept that the content may survive somewhere anyway.

  5. Expect Curiosity
    When I set rules for others, whether at work or at home, I remember that banning something without explaining why can make it more attractive, not less.

  6. Notice It in Others
    When I see a strong attempt to hide something, I ask what makes it worth hiding, but I also remember that people can provoke a ban on purpose to make their message look more important.


Pitfalls and Limitations

  • Most censorship works. We only hear about the cases that backfired, while many attempts to remove information succeed quietly, which makes the effect seem more common than it is.

  • Attention fades. A spike in curiosity often lasts only days, and long after the noise has died down, the information may be just as hard to find as before.

  • It can be used as a tactic. Some people deliberately provoke attempts to silence them, because being censored makes their message look braver and more important than it is.

  • Some things should be removed. The fear of drawing attention shouldn’t stop us from taking down private data, harassment or dangerous content, even if a few people notice.


Related Mental Models

The Streisand Effect reminds me that attention is hard to control and that the harder I push something away, the more people will want to look at it. By asking who actually knows, imagining how my response will look and choosing openness over suppression, I can avoid turning a small problem into a big one.



To learn more about mental models and philosophy,
check out: Wise: How to Attain a Deep Understanding of the World, History, Our Place in It, and How to Live Well



📚 Sources and References