Short Stuff: Streisand Effect

What does Barbra Streisand have to do with the internet? Listen and learn!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
there's Babs. This is short stuff. Let's go Babs. Yeah,
we talked about this at some point, the Streisand effect,
wherein when you try to cover something up online, all
you do is draw more attention to it. Yeah, and
it blows up in your face a ka, backfires Barbara. Yeah,

(00:28):
but I mean Barbara Streisand isn't the first person to
have something blow up in her face or backfire when
she tried to censor anything, and yet she got saddled
with this term. I think it's just a little bit
of internet justice. Maybe, um, but at the very least,
we should probably give a little background on what Barbara
did to try to censor something in the first place

(00:48):
on the internet that drew the ire that ended up
getting her saddled with this. Wait a minute, that was
way too long for a short stuff, Chuck, let's edit
this out and start over. So in two thousand three,
Babs sued a photographer his name is Kenneth Adelman, because
she said, I want you to delete this photo that

(01:09):
you took from the sky that has my Malibu estate
in it. She said, will you delete and he said, uh, well,
first of all, I was I'm not paparazzo. I was
doing an online project trekking erosion on the coastline. Your
house happened to be in it, and it's a big

(01:29):
environmental issue. And she said, well, I don't care. I'm
gonna sue you for fifty million dollars. Fifty million dollars.
This guy is not you know, it's not Sheldon Addleson.
It's Kenneth Addleman. He doesn't have fifty million dollars. And
she wasn't laying out in the nude. It was just
her house, right, And again it was part of this

(01:50):
erosion project. So um, when it got out pretty quickly
that Barbara Streisan was suing some some guy for fifty
million dollar dollers, it got picked up by the news
and a lot of attention was drawn to this previously
fully overlooked thing, which was the photo of her house
on the Malibu Coastline. I believe it had been downloaded

(02:13):
six times in the entire history of that photographs existence, um,
and two of those times were by her lawyer. But
I think the number jumped up quite a bit after
word got out about the lawsuit. Is that not correct, Chuck, Yeah,
the streisand effect happened and it was downloaded close to
a half a million, half a million times. And the
next month after this lawsuit came out, and it prompted

(02:38):
a blogger from dirt Tech name Michael Masnick to what
I say, dirt tech, dirt Tech, that's the hillbilly version.
Uh he he labeled the strice End effect, and it
kind of took hold. Yeah, it did, um because it's
catchy and everybody likes Barbra Streisen, but there's also something

(02:58):
about her that everybody doesn't like to you know, Uh,
Emily loves her. There's nothing she doesn't like really since
a little like then No, No, she's a big fan
of Babs that that Christmas record plays on repeat. Have
you ever heard well that I'm sure that the answer

(03:19):
to this is yes. Have you ever heard, um that
her duets with Barry Gibb Oh? Sure those are great? Okay, Yeah,
they're about as good as a duet gets. And Barbara
Strasend's great on her own. But I just think personally,
I get the impression that she's always been the kind
who would suit just an average person. For fifty million dollars.

(03:40):
You know what I mean. You've never heard her take
on jingle bells. I don't think so, which is bizarre
because I've been on this planet for forty three years,
and I thought I've heard every Christmas song ever created
around the world fifty million times. Oh, you would know it.
It's uh, she she changes it up a lot. I
gotta hear this. It's jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell,

(04:03):
jingle love the way. Hey what yes, Chuck, you just
literally changed my life. Yeah, just go listen to it
after this. You'll get a kick out of it, all right,
I definitely will you. You're probably gonna want to throw
your sound system out the window. Or you might think
it's the best thing ever. It's it's one of the two. Okay,
maybe I'll just keep vascillating back and forth. All right,

(04:24):
So Strice in effect happens, she gets labeled, uh, you know,
gets named after her. And they've actually been studies on
this kind of thing since then. There was one in
China in two thousand eighteen that found out that their
attempts as a country to block access to Facebook and
Twitter and other social media sites um that people may
not have been interested in have they not tried to

(04:45):
block it? Prompted millions of people UH to download VP
and software just so they could get access to these sites.
So it's the whole idea of the forbidden fruit. It's
like that that UM Chief Wigham telling Ralph to stay
out of his forbidden closet of mystery. It's like, why
are you so fascinated with whatever is in my forbidden
closet of mystery? That's definitely part of it. It's like,

(05:08):
if you're saying no, you're not allowed to see this,
you're basically saying, do everything you can to see what
I'm trying to keep you from seeing. UM. And just
like how how Streisand's UM house photo that only be
downloaded six times prior to the lawsuit and then went
up to four thousand times right after. UM. That's just

(05:29):
it's just part and parcel with it. If you leave
it alone. I don't know about China and news of
democracies and what democracies are doing, that might be an exception,
but typically if you leave whatever you're trying to censor alone,
apparently that will that will attract less attention to it
than than saying like, you're not allowed to hear this.
This is censored. Yeah, I mean, it's also the conundrum

(05:51):
that every parent faces every day that their kid grows up.
Is like everything from curse words like not making a
big deal about it, to whatever they're watching and stuff
like that. It's just you know, it's like, well maybe
if we don't make a big deal out of it,
it's not going to be a big deal. Yes, there
is a giant bird and he's yellow and he loves you,
but you cannot see him. You're not allowed to watch that.

(06:16):
All right. We're gonna take a break and come back
and talk about a few other versions of the Strisand
effect over the years right after this. So I just

(06:44):
want to point out if you're not gonna laugh at
my jokes today, I'll laugh at my own jokes. I'll
be over. Yeah, the big bird joke was a good one,
all right. So, um, there's a pair of researchers Sue
Curry Jensen and Brian Martin, and together they kind of
created this paper partially on the Streisand effect, and they

(07:06):
gave some other examples, like you know, in addition to
Barber Streisand and China um banning Twitter and Facebook Um,
some other other groups have have famously, you know, tried
to censor things and it's blown up in their face.
And one of them was I don't remember where we
talked about it before, but the Mick Libel case, we
definitely have mentioned it before. Yeah, this was McDonald's in

(07:29):
the nineties. They sued a couple of volunteers from London
green Peace because they had put out a pamphlet called
What's wrong with McDonald's and this, you know, this is
a street pamphlet. It wasn't even online. I mean, may
have been at some point, but this is the nineties,
so you know how pamphlets, it's not like that goes wide. Um,

(07:50):
they were just pamphlets and they until they got sued
and the British press got ahold of it, called it,
like you said, McLibel, and it became the longest running
civil trial in the history of Britain. And they lost
that one too, So it's they didn't get the message
or I guess when was Streisand's was that in the
eighties Streisan No Streisand's was two thousand three because it

(08:12):
was really internet project. Yeah, this proceeded Barbara Streisand so
she hadn't take a note from McDonald's maybe don't bring
the lawsuit, No, because I mean the fact that it
was the longest running civil trial. The press stays interested
in that kind of thing, so pretty frequently they would
interview the plaintiffs or the defendants in the case and
they would just give them this big microphone to talk

(08:33):
about all the horrible things McDonald's was doing. It was
a It was a bad move on McDonald's part, for sure. Um.
There was also one, as far as food goes, a
schoolgirl in Scotland named Martha Payne who was nine at
the time, back in two thousand twelve, and she sounds
like one of the cooler nine year olds I've ever
heard of. She had a food blog, but her food
blog was about how terrible the food was at her school,

(08:56):
in her cafeteria, and so she would take pictures of
her school lunch and posted a picture on her blog
and talk about the food and all that. And I
guess Jamie Oliver, who's a well known food guy and
food communicator, if there is such a thing. Sure, Um, yeah,
So Jamie Oliver tweeted about it and there was a
bunch of traffic to her blog, and the local school

(09:18):
board said, oh, we we can't have this. She's gonna
make us look dumb, so let's just ban her from
taking photos in school of her food. Yeah, that didn't
work out. That blew up in their face as well,
because then what you end up being accused of is
like squashing the voice of a child. Um. Kind of
like what happened recently here in Georgia when that high
school girl took a picture of her crowded school without masks,

(09:41):
and they suspended her for like a day. And then
we're like, uh, never mind, you can. I guess we
shouldn't try and squash health whistleblowers in high school their
Torrian sound. Yeah, so they let her back in school too,
They did. It was it was, it was rough, just
a very idea that they suspended her for. That is

(10:02):
really disappointing. What's even more disappointing, though, is that um
that the two researchers I mentioned early or um they
basically said, you know, there's some really great famous cases
about this streisand effect happening, but way more often than not,
the sensors who are working to censor things, um are

(10:24):
they do? They they censor and they like the streisand
effect doesn't happen. It's much more the exception than the rule.
And that even when UM there is a streisand effect
to it. There's kind of a playbook what they call
outrage management UM that's used to kind of keep the
public outcry against whatever was discovered or the censorship that

(10:46):
was discovered in in order in manageable, I guess, which
hence the name. Yeah, it's pretty scuzzy, uh to see
what they do, but it's sort of right out of
the playbook that you would expect. Oh, it all sounds
It sounds very familiar, doesn't it. Yeah, very Bynesian. And
plus it's just the kind of thing you see all

(11:06):
the time. You know, they trying to cover up or
they devalue the target, or they basically lie about it
and reinterpret it. UM. They Another one is use official
channels to give an appearance of justice, right and then
intimidate people. So they gave in this In this article,
Jansen and Martin gave an example of the Nazis and

(11:29):
their youthan Asia making air quotes everybody program of people
with disabilities, and that they used all five methods of
that UM. They hid the program from the public. That's
number one. Um, they stigmatized people with disabilities as a
burden for society. That's devaluing the target. They lied about
the events, so that's reinterpreting it. Anybody who had a question,

(11:53):
like a parent of the victim, that kind of thing,
they would just out and out say, oh, no, they
died of you know this other this other disease or
from natural causes or something. They also intimidated parents who
would not back down into saying, hey, you want to
lose the rest of your kids, no, well, then be quiet.
And then they also allowed for formal complaints to be levied. Um.
But of course they never went anywhere, so it gave

(12:14):
the appearance of using official channels for justice. So leave
it to the Nazis to check off all five of
those scuzzie boxes. Stupid Nazis. Yeah. I think one of
my favorite cases was when Al Franken, previous to being
a senator, wrote that book Lies and the lying liars
who tell them colon a fair and balanced to look
at the right and and Fox News took him to

(12:37):
court and says, wait a minute, that's our term fair
and balance. That's intellectual property and the judge said, no,
those are just two words that are pretty commonly used. Uh,
you don't own them. And Al Franken, I imagine as
soon as he heard that Fox News was suing him,
was like hit the roof and was like sweet because
all that did was bring just tons and tons of

(12:58):
pressed to his new book it was being launched. Yeah,
and I guess it shot right onto the best seller
list right after that too. So maybe Fox News will
come and sue us because of our book. Maybe we
should change the title the Stuff you should Know an
incomplete compendium of mostly interesting, fair and balanced things. Can

(13:19):
you believe this title? And then maybe we could get
taken the court and get a lot of publicity out
of it. That'd be wonderful, or chuck, if everybody just
went and bought our book, which you can pre order
now anywhere books are available, Um, that would have the
same effect without us having to go through the problem
being sued. That'd be great too, or having to go
back and retitle the things you got anything else? I

(13:41):
don't have anything else. Beautiful segue by the way, nice plug. Uh,
And since we don't have anything else and we're down
to plugs, short stuff is app. Stuff you should know
is production of iHeart Radios. How stuff works for more
podcasts for my heart Radio? Is it the iHeart Radio app?
Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

(14:05):
H