This typical phenomenon of the Internet age, like that of viral rumors, occurs when someone or an institution tries to silence some information – it can be a video, a photo, a tweet … – and it achieves the opposite effect: it circulates a lot More than if he hadn't received such inadvertent publicity . Its name comes from the famous case that the actress and singer Barbra Streisand starred in when she tried to remove an aerial image of her Californian mansion in 2003. Of course, what she did was arouse the interest of the public.
The list of events attributable to the Streisand effect is long: from the crisis of the Muhammad cartoons , which largely transcended the Danish audience for which they were originally intended, to the famous photos of Zapatero's daughters with the Obamas in 2009.
Photo: 2002 Kenneth & Gabrielle Adelman, California Coastal Records Project, www.californiacoastline.org
