Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Streisand Effect

Episode Date: September 9, 2020

What does Barbra Streisand have to do with the internet? Listen and learn! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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, aka backfires. Barbara. Yeah, 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, 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 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 2003, Babs sued a photographer. His name was Kenneth Adelman, because she said, I want you to delete this photo that you took from the sky that has my Malibu estate in it. She said, will you delete it? And he said, well, first of all, I'm not paparazzo.

I was doing an online project tracking erosion on the coastline. Your house happened to be in it, and this is a big environmental issue. And she said, well, I don't care. I'm gonna sue you for $50 million. $50 million. This guy is not, you know, it's not Sheldon Adelson.

It's Kenneth Adelman. He doesn't have $50 million. And she wasn't laying out in the nude. It was just her house. Right, and again, it was part of this erosion project. So when it got out pretty quickly that Barbara Streisand was suing some guy for $50 million, 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 six times in the entire history of that photograph's existence. 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 times in the next month after this lawsuit came out. And it prompted a blogger from DirtTech named Michael Masnik to, what did I say? DirtTech. DirtTech, I like that even better.

That's the Hillbilly version. He labeled the Streisand effect and it kind of took hold. Yeah, it did, because it's catchy. And everybody likes Barbara Streisand, but there's also something about her that everybody doesn't like too, you know? Emily loves her.

There's nothing she doesn't like. Really? She doesn't seem a little like, hmm. No, no, no, she's a big fan of Babs, that Christmas record plays on repeat about December in my house. Oh, I did appreciate a Christmas record. Have you ever heard, well, I'm sure that the answer

to this is yes. Have you ever heard that her duets with Barry Gibb? Oh, sure, those are great. Okay, yeah, they're about as good as a duet gets. And Barbara Streisand is great on her own, but I just think personally, I get the impression that she's always been the kind who would sue just an average person for $50 million.

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 43 years and I thought I've heard every Christmas song ever created around the world 50 million times. Oh, you would know it, she changes it up a lot. Oh, I gotta hear this.

It's Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle all 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're probably gonna wanna throw your sound system out the window, or you might think it's the best thing ever. It's one of the two. Okay, maybe I'll just keep vacillating back and forth. All right, so Streisand Effect happens. She gets labeled, or gets named after her, and there have actually been studies on this kind of thing since then.

There was one in China in 2018 that found out that their attempts as a country to block access to Facebook and Twitter and other social media sites that people may not have been interested in had they not tried to block it, prompted millions of people 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 Chief Wiggum telling Ralph to stay out of his forbidden closet of mystery. He's like, why are you so fascinated with whatever's in my forbidden closet of mystery? That's definitely part of it. It's like, 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. And just like how Streisand's house photo had only been downloaded six times prior to the lawsuit and then went up to 420,000 times right after, that'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 attract less attention to it than saying, like you're not allowed to hear this, this is censored. Yeah, I mean, it's also the conundrum 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 gonna 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.

All right, we're gonna take a break and come back and talk about a few other versions of the Strysand effect over the years right after this. ["Strysand Effect"] On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references

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on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

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on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So I just want to point out, if you're not gonna laugh at my jokes today, I'll laugh at my own jokes. I'll be taking over. Yeah, the Big Bird joke was a good one. All right. So 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 gave some other examples like, you know, in addition to Barbara Streisand and China, banning Twitter and Facebook. Some other groups 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 McLeible case. We definitely have mentioned it before. Yeah, this was McDonald's in the 90s. They sued a couple of volunteers from London Greenpeace 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 was the 90s. So, you know how pamphlets, it's not like that goes wide. They were just pamphlets and they, until they got sued. And the British press got ahold of it, called it, like you said, McLeible. 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 80s? Streisand's, no, Streisand's was 2003 because it was a really internet project. Yeah, this preceded Barbara Streisand. So she didn'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 about all the horrible things McDonald's was doing.

It was a bad move on McDonald's part for sure. There was also one, as far as food goes, a school girl in Scotland named Martha Payne, who was nine at the time, back in 2012. 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

in her cafeteria. And so she would take pictures of her school lunch and post 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. Yeah, so Jamie Oliver tweeted about it

and there was a bunch of traffic to her blog. And the local school board said, oh, 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 squashing the voice of a child. Kind of like what happened recently here in Georgia when that high school girl took a picture of her crowded school without masks. They suspended her for a day and then were like, nevermind, I guess we shouldn't try and squash health whistleblowers in high school.

Right. They didn't squash their voice. Valdatorian sound. Yeah, so they let her back in school too. They did. It was rough. Just the very idea that they suspended her for that is really disappointing.

What's even more disappointing though is that the two researchers I mentioned early, or they basically said, there's some really great famous cases about this Streisand effect happening. But way more often than not, the censors who are working to censor things are, they do, they censor and they,

like the Streisand effect doesn't happen. It's much more the exception than the rule. And that even when there is a Streisand effect to it, there's kind of a playbook, what they call Outrage Management, that's used to kind of keep the public outcry against whatever was discovered, or the censorship that was discovered in order,

in manageable, I guess, which, hence the name. Yeah, it's pretty scuzzy to see what they do, but it's sort of right out of the playbook that you would expect out of PR. Oh yeah, it sounds very familiar, doesn't it? Yeah, very Bernaysian. And plus it's just the kind of thing you see all the time. They try and do a cover up,

or they devalue the target, or they basically lie about it and reinterpret it. Another one is use official channels to give an appearance of justice, and then intimidate people. So they gave in this article, Jansen and Martin gave an example of the Nazis and their euthanasia, making air quotes everybody,

program of people with disabilities, and that they used all five methods of that. They hid the program from the public, that's number one. They stigmatized people with disabilities as a burden for society that's devaluing the target. They lied about the event, so that's reinterpreting it. Anybody who had a question, like a parent of the victim, that kind of thing,

they would just out and out say, oh no, they died of this other disease or from natural causes or something. They also intimidated parents who would not back down into saying, hey, do you wanna lose the rest of your kids? No, well, then be quiet. And then they also allowed for formal complaints to be levied, but of course they never went anywhere.

So it gave the appearance of using official channels for justice. So leave it to the Nazis to check off all five of those skezzy 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, Colin, a fair and balanced look at the right,

and Fox News took him to court and says, wait a minute, that's our term, fair and balanced, that's intellectual property. And the judge said, no, those are just two words that are pretty commonly used. 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 press to his new book that was being launched. Yeah, and I guess it shot right onto the bestseller list right after that, too. So maybe Fox News will come and sue us because of our book. Maybe we should change the title to stuff you should know

an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting, fair and balanced things. Yeah, Colin, can you believe this title? And then maybe we could get taken to 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,

that would have the same effect without us having to go through the problem of being sued. That'd be great, too. Or having to go back and retitle the thing. You got anything else? I don't have anything else. Beautiful Segway, by the way, nice plug. And since we don't have anything else

and we're down to plugs, short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.