Politics & Crime The Streisand Effect: When Internet Censorship Backfires

The highly anticipated video of LeBron James getting dunked on leaked Wednesday, despite Nike and LeBron’s attempts to keep it under wraps. In other weekly pop culture news, the Erin Andrews “peeping tom” video also leaked, gaining major exposure thanks to ESPN’s legal team. In both cases, the corporate push for surpression had the opposite effect, giving the videos the extra publicity they needed to go fully viral. This unintended effect happens so often on the Internet that it has an official name:

The Streisand Effect refers to “an Internet phenomenon where an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information backfires… [and] instead of being suppressed, the information receives extensive publicity, often being widely mirrored across the Internet, or distributed on file-sharing networks (Wikipedia).”

See you learn a new term everyday. Hit the jump for the Complex’s history of the Streisand Effect, when censorship failed, and everyone got a look, listen, and feel of the supposedly “banned” content…