List of Streisand effect examples

Summarize Timeline Top Qs Fact Check

In November 2024, an attempt led by Vice President Victoria Villarruel to ban certain books from schools for being "degrading and immoral"^[1] led to one such book, Cometierra, becoming a bestseller.^[2]

In March 2022, incumbent Australian federal MP Tim Wilson, in what had previously been considered to be the safe seat of Goldstein, drew national attention to his independent challenger Zoe Daniel when he made legal objections to posting of campaign signs by volunteers on the fences of private residences.^[3] This also led to a significant increase in donations to the Daniel campaign.^{[4][better source needed]}

In May 2024, Australia's richest person, Gina Rinehart, demanded that the National Gallery of Australia remove an unflattering caricature of herself, painted by Aboriginal Australian artist Vincent Namatjira. Rinehart pressured 20 Australian swimmers she was sponsoring to lobby for the removal. Her actions were covered by many news outlets and brought new audiences to Namatjira's art.^[5]

In December 2024, Rachael Gunn, Australia's Olympic breakdancer, attempted to legally suppress a comedy musical about her performance. Her legal threats were worked into a revised version of the show, which then played to larger audiences.^[6][7]

In December 2023, the Canadian Armed Forces at CFB Kingston sent a base-wide email addressing a sex worker advertising on base. The worker, who was essentially unknown to most soldiers at the time, became instantly recognizable as the email effectively advertised the woman and her services to the entire base. This situation was compounded after the story appeared in a number of national news outlets.^[8]

A 2018 study of millions of individual responses of Chinese social media users found that sudden censorship of information by the Chinese government and its affiliates often led to mass backlashes, including newfound popularity of virtual private networks and the subsequent reviewing of entire topic lists on which censored subjects appear.^[9] Other researchers found that the backlash tended to result in permanent changes to political attitudes and behaviors.^[10]

In August 2020, it was reported that the Chinese government had blanked out parts of Baidu's mapping platform, and that this could be used to find a network of buildings bearing hallmarks of prisons and internment camps in Xinjiang.^[11]

On June 3, 2022, Chinese e-commerce livestreamer Li Jiaqi was interrupted for showing a tank-shaped ice cream cake in a livestream and failed to show up for the next scheduled show. This sudden suspension drew more attention to the sensitivity of the tank symbol on the eve of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre; the interruption paradoxically triggered widespread online discussion and searches regarding "June 4th", increasing awareness of the suppressed history.^[12][13][14]

In January 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic in China, the Jyllands-Posten newspaper received international attention when it published a cartoon depicting the Chinese flag with yellow virus-like figures instead of the usual yellow stars.^[15][16] The illustrator received numerous threats, and social media platforms were flooded by illustrations of the Danish flag that had been edited to included feces, texts like alle jeres familier døde ("all your families are dead") and similar mockery in what experts regarded as a coordinated action, much of it spread by newly started profiles that appeared to be automated.^[17][18][19] The Chinese embassy in Denmark demanded an official apology from Jyllands-Posten.^[20] Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen refused to apologize on behalf of the Danish government, declaring that there is freedom of speech in Denmark.^[21] Other Danish newspapers, although some of them regarded the illustration as impolite, supported Jyllands-Posten, noting that Danish newspapers operate under Danish law, not based on intimidation from a non-democratic country, and also pointed out that few would have seen the illustration if not for the actions of the Chinese embassy.^[16]

When Hong Kong's secretary for justice filed an injunction to bar the distribution of pro-democracy protest song Glory to Hong Kong with the intention to incite secession, sedition, or to violate the national anthem law, Senior Counsel Abraham Chan said the government's injunction application "would bring about an own goal" by amplifying that which it sought to prohibit. Chan cited "empirical evidence" that after the government announced that it would apply for a ban, "the level of engagement with the song increased".^[22]

When Liu Xiaobo was awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize for "his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China", the Chinese Communist Party censored the news domestically, while publicly denouncing the Nobel Prize internationally. Most Western democracies, however, publicly praised the award and attended the awards ceremony despite pressure from Chinese diplomats.^[23][24]

When tennis star Peng Shuai disappeared after accusing Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli of raping her, the Chinese Communist Party's censorship of her story and subsequent staged public appearances of Peng drew increased worldwide scrutiny to her whereabouts and safety.^[25][26]

On June 10, 2025, the National Security Department of the Hong Kong Police Force issued a warning reminding citizens that downloading, sharing, recommending, or funding the mobile game *Reversed Front: Beacon Fire* could violate the Hong Kong national security law or the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance. This warning paradoxically led to a sharp increase in the game's popularity, with a significant rise in search and download volumes, gaining further public attention and recognition.^{[27][28][29][30]}

The French intelligence agency DCRI's attempt to delete the French Wikipedia article about the military radio station of Pierre-sur-Haute resulted in the restored article temporarily becoming the most-viewed page on the French Wikipedia.^[31]

A 2013 libel suit by Greek politician Theodore Katsanevas against a Greek Wikipedia editor resulted in members of the project bringing the story to the attention of journalists.^[32]

In 2020, Ákos Radnóti [hu], a politician of Fidesz and then deputy mayor of Győr sued a resident of his city, identified only as Zoltán B., for a Facebook comment posted on a friend's personal profile page. In July 2020, one of B's friends shared a blog post accusing Radnóti of voter solicitation, under which B. commented "pay no attention to him, he's a dick". The deputy mayor sued B. for defamation, and B. was sentenced to three years of probation.^[33][34]

The case received wide media attention, in part because Radnóti's party has a poor reputation in the areas of free speech and other human rights,^[35] in part because the politician's lawyer was the same Zoltán Rákosfalvy who defended ex-mayor Zsolt Borkai during his sex and corruption scandal in the preceding year,^[34] and in part because B's sentence was seen as comparatively harsh (the trial happened the same month in which ex-diplomat Gábor Kaleta was sentenced to one year of probation and a monetary fine for owning thousands of child pornography photographs^[36]). Radnóti, who had previously been unknown outside his city, was widely criticised for being too sensitive and vindictive, and the outcome met disapproval from the general public, since politicians are public officials who are generally expected to endure criticism.^[37] Radnóti and the case was widely parodied online,^[38] with one popular blogger commenting that "he is more like a pussy" and paraphrasing a scene from Kafka's The Metamorphosis, with Radnóti being transformed into a penis.^[39] His Wikipedia page has been vandalized several times, with his profession being stated as "dick".^[40] A widespread joke stated that B. was in fact sentenced for releasing classified information.

B. appealed the sentence. As during the previous trial, he was defended by a lawyer of the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, while Radnóti represented himself this time, to avoid further association with Rákosfalvy.^[40] In January 2021 B. was acquitted on the basis that the politician received the insult as a consequence of his acts as a public official, thus he has to endure criticism.^[40][41]

In February 2023, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India sought to ban India: The Modi Question, a BBC documentary that was critical of him.^[42] This led to students in colleges across India screening the documentary on their own,^[43] on campus and elsewhere. Commentators argued that the ban had drawn more attention to the documentary than it would otherwise have received.^[44][45]

In May 2009, the Israeli right-wing nationalist political party Yisrael Beiteinu introduced a bill that would outlaw all commemorations of the expulsion of Palestinians following the 1948 Palestine war, known as "Nakba", with a three-year prison sentence for such acts of remembrance.^[46][47] The original bill did not pass, and the controversy surrounding it unintentionally promoted knowledge of the Nakba within Israeli society.^[48][49][50]

A 2019 study of political imprisonment by the government of Saudi Arabia found that while incarceration tended to deter individual dissidents from further dissent, it strongly emboldened their social media followers, led to a sharp increase in calls for political reform, and resulted in an increase in online dissent and physical in-person protests overall, including criticism of the ruling family and calls for regime change.^[51] Such repression also draws public attention to the imprisoned dissidents and their causes, and does not deter other prominent figures in Saudi Arabia from continuing to dissent online.^[52]

In 2017, the government of South Africa stated their intention to ban a book by Jacques Pauw, The President's Keepers, detailing corruption within the government of then-President Jacob Zuma. This resulted in sales of the book skyrocketing, and it sold out within 24 hours before the ban was to be put into effect.^[53][54] The book became a national bestseller and led to multiple reprints.^[55] This effect was repeated when Pauw published Our Poisoned Land (2023) and the Economic Freedom Fighters took legal action in an effort to ban the book, thereby resulting in an increase in book sales.^[56][57]

In November 2007, Tunisia blocked access to YouTube and Dailymotion after material was posted depicting Tunisian political prisoners. Activists and their supporters then started to link the location of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's palace on Google Earth to videos about civil liberties in general. The Economist said this "turned a low-key human-rights story into a fashionable global campaign".^[58]

On June 18, 2022, The Times reported claims that Boris Johnson had tried to hire his now-wife Carrie Symonds as his chief of staff when he was foreign secretary. Although it was published on its first printed edition, it was then swiftly removed without explanation.^[59] It was also mentioned on MailOnline, who rewrote the Times story in the early hours of the morning before also deleting its article without explanation or an editor's note. Rival newspaper The Guardian mentioned that this incident could backfire as an example of the Streisand effect.^[59] A few days later on June 21, 10 Downing Street said that the prime minister's special advisers asked The Times to retract the article, leading to questions about the objectivity of the editorship of the newspaper.^[60]

On January 19, 2024, British musician Brendan Kavanagh was livestreaming a performance on a public piano at London King's Cross station when he was harassed by a group of Chinese individuals claiming to be filming an undisclosed television program. They stated that since they had just been filmed by him, but did not want the unreleased program to be uploaded, they demanded the deletion of segments from his livestream. Although they attempted to suppress the dissemination of the footage, Kavanagh did not comply; the relevant video subsequently went viral on social media, garnering millions of views and widespread public attention.^[61][62]

On January 9, 2025, former Prime Minister Liz Truss sent a cease and desist letter to Prime Minister Keir Starmer demanding that he stop saying that she "crashed the economy", in reference to the aftermath of the September 2022 United Kingdom mini-budget which triggered the end of her premiership. The letter was then widely covered in the British media, drawing further attention to the claims that Truss had crashed the economy, which were repeated in parliament by Leader of the House of Commons Lucy Powell who stated "we won't cease and desist from telling the truth that they [the Conservatives] crashed the economy".^[63][64]

In March 2019, US Representative (R–California) Devin Nunes filed a defamation lawsuit against Twitter and three users for US$250 million in damages. One user named in the lawsuit, the parody account @DevinCow (Name: Devin Nunes' cow), had 1,200 followers before the lawsuit. After the suit, however, @DevinCow had gained some 600,000 additional followers.^[65]

In October 2020, the New York Post published emails from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, detailing an alleged corruption scheme.^[66] After internal discussion that debated whether the story may have originated from Russian misinformation and propaganda, Twitter blocked the story from their platform and locked the accounts of those who shared a link to the article, including the New York Post's own Twitter account, and White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, among others.^[67] Researchers at MIT cited the increase of 5,500 shares every 15 minutes to about 10,000 shares shortly after Twitter censored the story, as evidence of the Streisand effect nearly doubling the attention the story received.^[68] Twitter removed the ban the following day.

Around the time that American politician JD Vance was nominated as the 2024 Republican vice presidential candidate, a July 15, 2024 Twitter post falsely said that Vance's memoir Hillbilly Elegy described him masturbating using a latex glove placed between couch cushions, leading to the creation of several Internet memes. This transparently false Internet hoax gained enough virality that the Associated Press published a fact check on July 24 to debunk it, but the agency removed the fact check from its website the next day saying it had not gone through the agency's "standard editing process". The removal itself became a news item, drawing more attention to the hoax, and it was described by The Daily Telegraph as an example of the Streisand effect.^[69]

On February 17th, 2026, a Federal Communications Commission rule change^[70] led to the suppression of the interview with a Texas senatorial candidate James Talarico on the CBS The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.^[71][72] The interview was instead published on YouTube^[73] where it reached 3 million views in just 18 hours,^[74] compared to the show rating of 2.69 million viewers on average in the last quarter of 2025.^[75]

Summarize Timeline Top Qs Fact Check

In April 2007, a group of companies that used Advanced Access Content System (AACS) encryption issued cease-and-desist letters demanding that the system's 128-bit (16-byte) numerical key (represented in hexadecimal as 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0) be removed from several high-profile websites, including Digg. With the numerical key and some software, it was possible to decrypt the video content on HD-DVDs. This led to the key's proliferation across other sites and chat rooms in various formats, with one commentator describing it as having become "the most famous number on the Internet".^[76] Within a month, the key had been reprinted on over 280,000 pages, had been printed on T-shirts and tattoos, had been published as a book, and had appeared on YouTube in a song played over 45,000 times.^[77]

In September 2009, multi-national oil company Trafigura obtained a super-injunction to prevent The Guardian newspaper from reporting on an internal Trafigura investigation into the 2006 Ivory Coast toxic waste dump scandal. A super-injunction prevents reporting on even the existence of the injunction. Using parliamentary privilege, Labour MP Paul Farrelly referred to the super-injunction in a parliamentary question and on October 12, 2009, The Guardian reported that it had been gagged from reporting on the parliamentary question, in violation of the Bill of Rights 1689.^[78][79][80] Blogger Richard Wilson correctly identified the blocked question as referring to the Trafigura waste dump scandal, after which The Spectator suggested the same. Not long after, Trafigura began trending on Twitter, helped along by Stephen Fry's retweeting the story to his followers.^[81] Twitter users soon tracked down all details of the case, and by October 16, the super-injunction had been lifted and the report published.^[82]

In November 2012, Casey Movers, a Boston moving company, threatened to sue a woman in Hingham District Court for libel in response to a negative Yelp review. The woman's husband wrote a blog post about the situation, which was then picked up by Techdirt^[83] and Consumerist.^[84] By the end of the week, the company was reviewed by the Better Business Bureau, which later revoked its accreditation.^[85]

In December 2013, YouTube user ghostlyrich uploaded video proof that his Samsung Galaxy S4 battery had spontaneously caught fire. Samsung had demanded proof before honoring its warranty. Once Samsung learned of the YouTube video, it added additional conditions to its warranty, demanding ghostlyrich delete his YouTube video, promise not to upload similar material, officially absolve the company of all liability, waive his right to bring a lawsuit, and never make the terms of the agreement public. Samsung also demanded that a witness cosign the settlement proposal. When ghostlyrich shared Samsung's settlement proposal online, his original video drew 1.2 million views in one week.^[86][87]

In September 2018, The Verge, an American technology news and media network operated by Vox Media, published an article titled "How to Build a Custom PC for Editing, Gaming or Coding" and uploaded a video to YouTube titled "How we Built a $2000 Custom Gaming PC", which was widely criticized for its instructions that would have been harmful or dangerous to both the computer and user if followed, and its numerous factual errors, such as claiming anti-vibration pads were for electrical insulation, and confusing zip ties with tweezers.^[88][89] In February 2019, Vox Media started issuing Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices to YouTube channels which posted content using clips from the video, most notably to technology channels Bitwit and ReviewTechUSA,^[88][90] bringing further attention to the video and the related content they attempted to suppress.^[88] After an outcry following the decision, YouTube reinstated these two videos, along with retracting the copyright "strikes" applied.^[91]

On February 20, 2020, Apple filed a legal complaint against the sales of the German-language book App Store Confidential, written by a former German App Store manager, Tom Sadowski. Apple cited confidential business information as the reason for requesting the sales ban. However, the publicity brought on by the media caused the book to reach number two on the Amazon bestseller list in Germany. The book was soon on its second print run.^[92]

In October 2020, the RIAA filed a DMCA takedown against the youtube-dl repository on GitHub, resulting in the repository and several forks being taken down. However, over 100 forks of the original repository appeared on GitHub in the days following the takedown request.^[93]

In May 2023, Nintendo issued a cease-and-desist notice against the Dolphin emulator appearing on Steam. As a result, Google searches of the emulator surged.^[94]

In November 2023, PR agency Mogul Press issued a DMCA takedown notice against a blog post^[95][96] by investigative journalist and tax lawyer Dan Neidle which contained commentary that was critical of their business practices. At the time of writing the resulting Twitter threads highlighting Mogul Press' actions have been viewed over 400,000 times (combined).^[97][98]

In March 2025, Meta won an arbitration ruling to prohibit ex-employee Sarah Wynn-Williams from promoting her book that criticized the company. This resulted in increased attention to the book.^[99]

On 8 December 2025, a Swiss online investigative news magazine Republik published a report in German, that an American surveillance-analytics company Palantir Technologies have been attempting to sell its service to various sectors in Swiss government over several years, but was rejected on non-necessity and as a likely breach of data sovereignty in case of military sector. In January 2026, Palantir responded by filing Swiss rights-to-reply lawsuit against the magazine; resulting in the report getting translated into English and publicized worldwide by European Federation of Journalists,^[100] Financial Times,^[101] Techdirt,^[102] and various other online outlets.

On December 21, 2025, CBS stopped an episode of 60 Minutes, Inside CECOT, from airing, postponing it to another day. It was alleged postponed owing to censorship and political interference. The episode would result in increased attention and would be shared widely online, in particular after it was aired via broadcast syndication in Canada.^[103]

In January 2026, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella demanded that people stop calling artificial intelligence "slop" and instead accept AI as the "new equilibrium" of human nature.^[104] The public reaction instead made people double down on the backlash, and the term "Microslop" became popular on social media.^[105][106] In March 2026, several reports from the Microsoft Copilot Discord server found that the word "Microslop" was blacklisted. The term "Microslop" is used to describe discontent with Microsoft's practices, especially with the push of artificial intelligence features such as Copilot. ^[107][108]