Internet censorship and the Barbra Streisand effect (original) (raw)

Until last week, there was no obvious connection between Barbra Streisand and the world of oil trading – unless, that is, you had found those emotional extra scenes on the Yentl DVD, where Streisand as the Talmudic scholar-girl charters a ship to dump toxic sludge off the Ivory Coast. But last week, oil firm Trafigura and its lawyers Carter-Ruck fell foul of the Streisand Effect.

In 2003, Streisand slapped a $50m lawsuit on a photographer for uploading an aerial snapshot of her Malibu home. In striving to protect her privacy, however, the actor only stirred up outrage among internet users – nearly half a million of whom looked up the offending image over a single month. And so, as Barbra might say, A Rule Was Born – that when a celebrity tries to take information off the internet, the selfsame nugget will receive exponentially more attention.

The Streisand Effect is what did for Trafigura last week. Once bloggers were alerted to a parliamentary question that this paper was injuncted not to report, it was rapidly tracked down and spread about like so much Nutella. Cue lots of crowing about how Carter-Ruck was no match for Twitter.

Of course, it's far harder for even an ultra-aggressive lawyer to go after thousands of bloggers (many pseudonymous) than one newspaper. But while the Streisand Effect demonstrates the power of social media, it also suggests its limitations. First, this is a phenomenon whose defining characteristic isn't a love of freedom but an aggressive nosiness. That can often be a good thing, but this summer the object of heated internet interest was an illegal video of a naked TV presenter, ESPN's Erin Andrews.

Second, as the academic Evgeny Morozov points out, the Trafigura case could only have happened in "a well-established democracy with a vibrant public life". For all the talk of the internet as a universal force, Twitter protests about a similar cover-up in Turkmenistan would have got nowhere.

This isn't to sneer at digital activism, merely to point out that it still needs all the old public institutions, like ballsy newspapers and brave MPs. After all, it's a funny kind of revolution that demands little more than pecking away at the Twitter app on your iPhone while waiting for that second Appletini.