http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StreisandEffect

This entry is trivia, which is cool and all, but not a trope. On a work, it goes on the Trivia tab.

Barbra Streisand doesn't want you to see this picture. Well done, Barbra!

Advertisement:

If it becomes known that someone of power, fame, or influence is using strong measures to attempt to suppress a piece of information or a work, then many people will want to know what it is even if they never cared before.

Something horribly embarrassing or personal about you has been released — anything from a sex tape, to an unflattering photograph, to the nickname you had when you were younger — and you want to keep it out of the public eye. So you do whatever it takes to make it go away: lawsuits, cease-and-desist orders, DMCA takedowns, whatever you have at hand. But it backfires: the efforts to censor the information become public, and people who would otherwise be uninterested are now dying to know what all the commotion is about. Whatever you were trying to remove from the Internet gets mirrored and copied to hundreds of other sites; the sex tape goes viral; the childhood nickname becomes national talk show fodder; the unflattering picture ends up in the newspaper. In other words, your fears that everyone would see the dirt on you is the very thing that caused everyone to look at it, and the harder you try to fight it, the more popular it becomes — and you learned the hard way that you probably should've ignored it and acted like it was no big deal.

Advertisement:

Blogger Mike Masnick of Techdirt coined the phrase back in 2003 when American singer Barbra Streisand tried to suppress a photograph of her house, incidentally taken for a geological study on California's coastline, by unsuccessfully attempting to sue the photographer and force him to take the image off of his website. The public at large found out about this photo specifically because Streisand filed the lawsuit, leading to the photo becoming far more well-known than if she had done nothing at all, as the house was one of many in the study and in no way labelled as hers. Said image is the one at the top of this page.

This trope existed before the Internet was even a gleam in DARPA's eye, but since the spread of information is much faster, easier, and more difficult to prevent across the Internet than through other means, it is far more widespread and effective now.

Advertisement:

Psychologists have done studies and found that the subjects' desire for any kind of material increased when they were told that it was censored — the old Forbidden Fruit principle in action. Perhaps any authority considering the use of censorship should worry that this move might be counterproductive if it just gets people interested in the censored material. "Banned in Boston" was once a badge of dubious honor for books, much like R-ratings on movies are for kids.

There's a general principle here that almost everyone learns back in childhood: when someone looks like they're hiding something, they probably are, and it's probably something interesting. The only way to really keep something hidden is to have nobody look for it in the first place. Of course, acting too casually often sparks the same reaction.

Not to be confused with No Such Thing as Bad Publicity, which is very similar, but occurs when Moral Guardians attack something and draw more attention to it. This is basically that but without the Moral Guardians.

A form of Revealing Cover-Up; also a specific form of Hoist by His Own Petard. Usually a Hydra Problem as well. Sometimes related to Clumsy Copyright Censorship and, more rarely, Fanwork Ban. Will lead to an Open Secret. See also Internet Counterattack. Compare to Thought-Aversion Failure (telling someone to not think about something will lead to them thinking about it). Basically opposite to Forced Meme, where the individual or company tries to make something as popular as possible and fails in much the same way for much the same reasons. People who avert this Just Ignore It.

This page alone is a meta-example since its entire purpose is to catalog the instances of the effect.

Examples:

open/close all folders

In-universe examples:

Fan Works

Films  Live-Action

In Clear and Present Danger, faced with a discovery that a friend of the President was involved with the Escobedo drug cartel, the White House wants to hush it up and downplay their relationship. Jack Ryan suggests that they instead play up the relationship, "we were lifelong friends", which nullifies the potential scandal rather than amplifying it by looking like a Revealing Cover Up.

The Harder They Come: When Ivan, an unknown in the music industry, goes on the run from the police after shooting three officers, his song skyrockets in popularity. When the police tell his producer they're going to ban the song for glorifying criminality, the producer warns them that banning it will generate even more public interest.

In Untraceable, a killer sets up his victims to be tortured to death in front of a livestreaming camera; the more people watch, the quicker the victim dies. Despite warnings from a Genre Savvy cybercrime special agent, the FBI crime director denounces the website and urges people to avoid it, which causes the site's traffic to explode.

On a lighter note, when the protagonists in The Wizard of Oz heard The Great Oz proclaim, "pay no attention to that man behind the curtain", they really paid attention, and the jig was up.

Literature

In the novel Cat's Cradle, the entire religion of Bokononism is outlawed in The Republic of San Lorenzo, and its practice is punishable by death. Naturally, every single citizen, including the President who issued the law, is a devout follower. This is actually by arrangement, and part of the point of Bokononism: to create an entertaining drama (the tyrant in the city and the mad prophet in the jungle) that engages the people and helps distract them from how poor and miserable their lives are.

In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry's Quibbler interview setting the record straight is paid little attention, being that it's in a tabloid rag. Then Umbridge threatens to expel anyone caught with a copy of the Quibbler, and Hermione is delighted, explicitly pointing out that this guarantees everyone will find a way to get their hands on it. It helps that the Quibbler is so innocuous that most people were buying it just to figure out what on earth it printed to warrant getting banned.

Played with in A Song of Ice and Fire. When Stannis begins spreading rumors regarding the incestuous relationship between Cersei and Jamie, Cersei wants them crushed. When asked what he would do, Tyrion's response was "Nothing. If we leave it alone, everyone will forget the instant some other scandal comes out. If we crush it, it will only spread and convince people that it's true." Littlefinger adds a masterful variation; not only will they ignore it, but they'll spread equally lurid (although false) rumors about Stannis himself to impale Stannis on the same dilemma. Although their counter-rumor has had little effect in the following books and that incest rumor has become an Open Secret by the time of the fifth book (where Cersei is labelled brotherfucker in her Walk of Shame after publicly admitting to adultery, which, needless to say, gives weight to the rumors ). Mushroom, once the Fool of the Targaryen court back in the days of the civil war called the Dance of the Dragons, wrote a lurid and outright libellous set of "chronicles" making the entire family of that time look awful after most of them had killed each other and the remaining ones in a too-precarious position to just kill him over it. Subsequent Targaryen kings repeatedly tried to ban it and destroy all the copies. It can be found everywhere in the Kingdom (and in a lot of places beyond) by the start of the series, both in physical hardcopy and in still quite popular songs based on the rudest bits, strangely enough. Oops.

In Fifth Business, the Cool Old Guy priest Father Blazon amuses himself in his old age by acquiring and reading books that the Church had banned, to the consternation of his nurses.

An interesting version of this occurs in Star Trek: Federation. Someone hacks a secure Starfleet database looking for information on the Warp Bomb, a long discredited note it works, but is much more difficult to use and much less effective than standard weapons like photon torpedoes

In one story of Frog and Toad, the titular duo are going for a swim, with the latter wearing an Old-Timey Bathing Suit that he's embarrassed to be seen in because he thinks he looks funny in it. Then a turtle arrives at the pond and Toad asks Frog to shoo it away. When Frog attempts to do this and explains why, not only does the turtle decide to stick around with renewed interest, but all the other animals overhear the conversation and come down to the pond to see the funny-looking bathing suit Toad is wearing.

The children's novel Ban This Book! is all about a girl trying to check her favourite book out from the library, only to find a parent had asked for it to be banned, along with several others. The girl and her friends eventually create a little banned book library out of her locker, only stocking the books the parent had asked to ban and resulting in most of the school trying to get their hands on the books to see what all the fuss is about.

In Mistborn, Vin is surprised to learn that the Ministry doesn't ban books criticizing the Lord Ruler. To which Kelsier explains to her: Banning books is tricky business, Vin - the more stink the Ministry makes about a text, the more attention it will draw, and the more people will be tempted to read it. False Dawn is a stuffy volume, and by not forbidding it, the Ministry doomed it to obscurity.

Live-Action TV

In the second season finale of Arrested Development, Maeby is tasked with producing an American remake of a French film about cousins who are in love with each other (mirroring George-Michael's feelings for her). Ann organizes a protest which ends up making the film a hit.

In the Better Call Saul episode "Hero", after Jimmy McGill uses his billboard stunt to gain publicity. The stunt involves setting up a billboard that ripped off Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill's logo, then Jimmy getting a cease-and-desist order, then arranging for a freelance media team to record him when the guy taking down the billboard "accidentally" falls, prompting Jimmy to go up and save him. The HHM team see through the ruse when watching Jimmy on the afternoon news, but decide not to pursue further action against Jimmy since doing so would be this.

In Evil, Kristen and the gang discover that an influencer's seemingly innocuous makeup video actually includes a hidden message urging teenagers to kill themselves. Confronted with this, the influencer pulls the video and tells her millions of followers to definitely not share the video with anyone—thus practically guaranteeing it will be everywhere.

In the Father Ted episode "The Passion of St. Tibulus", the eponymous film, condemned by the Pope as "blasphemous" and banned everywhere else, is being shown on Craggy Island because of an unknown loophole. Bishop Brennan orders Ted and Dougal to picket the cinema showing the film. The protest has the effect of making the film (which is in French and undubbed) the most popular in the history of Craggy Island. Bishop Brennan: People are coming all the way from GDANSK! to see the film.

A later episode of M*A*S*H had the gang trying to get a copy of the film The Moon is Blue because it had been Banned in Boston. Charles, a Boston native, cautions that Boston would have banned Pinocchio, but Hawkeye and BJ pay him no heed, thinking it must be steamy. The capper to all the troubles they had obtaining it was them watching it and finding it terribly inoffensive. BJ: There was more filth in this morning's breakfast!

Discussed in The West Wing; in one episode, a photographer Sam once hired then fired has written a libelous tell-all book about the White House full of inaccurate but potentially scandalous and embarrassing half-truths and fabrications. After Sam spends the episode with a bee in his bonnet trying to do everything he can to get the book squashed and the White House to condemn every single falsehood within it, C.J and Toby sit him down and explain to him that making a huge deal out of it and using the full voice of the White House to condemn the photographer is just going to give him a bigger platform, whereas if they do nothing beyond curtly acknowledging his existence and a simple shrug of disinterest, they'll make it clear how insignificant he really is and his book will disappear before long.

In The X-Files, this the initial reason the Conspiracy doesn't just kill Mulder and Scully, based on the advice of the Cigarette-Smoking Man. As he claimed, currently Mulder was just some eccentric FBI agent rambling about conspiracies, but if he was murdered, then the conspiracy theories would be given credibility. As CSM tells one of the Syndicate members, "kill Mulder and you turn one man's religion into a crusade".

Invoked in Blindspot when FBI A/D Mayfair shoots down Carter's insistence on having Jane killed by pointing out that her tattoos had already been scanned, so the evidence was already preserved and killing her would just cause people to wonder what information in them was worth killing her over.

shoots down Carter's insistence on having Jane killed by pointing out that her tattoos had already been scanned, so the evidence was already preserved and killing her would just cause people to wonder what information in them was worth killing her over. Invoked in Babylon 5 when Captain Sheridan has Ivanova announce on her Voice of the Resistance TV show that absolutely nothing of note has happened in a particular sector of space (where he's just had a formation of White Stars blast some random asteroids). This is part of a Genghis Gambit he's playing on the League of Non-Aligned Worlds to get them to accept, nay, demand the Rangers serve as a peacekeeping force: as Sheridan well knows, Suspiciously Specific Denials are a good way to get people to wonder why you're denying it.

The Victorious episode "Bad Roommate" has Jade discovering an awkward satellite photo of her online and asks the guys not to tell anyone it exists. The next day, Jade discovers that the whole school now knows about it thanks to Cat telling people where not to look. Jade: What do you mean you told people not to look?

Cat: I tweeted it on TheSlap.

Jade: What did you tweet?

Cat: I wrote... "Please do not go on PearMaps and look up Hollywood Arts. If you do, do not zoom in on Jade. P.S. She's not picking her nose". I made it super clear.

Tabletop Games

The post-apocalyptic game Paranoia takes place in a city called Alpha Complex ruled by an all-powerful, tyrannical Computer. The Computer uses Communists as its go-to scapegoat, blaming them for a nuclear war. There was no war, Communism died out long before the apocalypse, and the Computer only blames Communism because of old civil-defense files left over from the 1950s . There is, however, a brand-new sect of Communists in Alpha Complex  a lot of citizens figure that, if the Computer is evil and the Computer hates Communists, then Communists have to be the good guys. Most records of actual Communism didn't survive, though, so they gladly follow the teachings of Groucho Marx and John Lennon.

Video Games

In Persona 5, the first boss, Shadow Kamoshida, heals himself by eating out of a giant trophy after the party inflicts significant damage on him, thereby forcing you to destroy the trophy in order to continue the battle. When the party damages the trophy, Kamoshida demands that they stop attacking it, thus causing Morgana to lampshade this trope. Morgana: When someone tells us not to do something, it makes us want to do it even more!

Web Comics

Freefall: Sam Starfall has apparently had previous practical demonstrations of this, according to this strip. Sam: My original mistakes never draw half the attention My original mistakes never draw half the attention as my attempts to cover them up do

Web Original

Worm, on the Parahumans Online forum where people are noticing that the word "Cauldron" is hidden unless censored, such as with an asterisk.

is hidden unless censored, such as with an asterisk. In Look to the West Part #266 , a New Spanish chef creates a version of boeuf bourguignon for the Paris WorldFest that uses his native wine rather than burgundy. The protests outside the pavilion by French chefs are considered to have attracted attention to an event that was pretty close to being called off for rain.

Western Animation

In The Simpsons, when Homer and others are about to tour the Duff Brewery: Tour Guide: Welcome to the Duff Brewery. Well, I'm sure that all of you have heard the rumors that a batch of Duff was contaminated with strychnine.

Tourists: [mumbling among themselves] No. Strychnine? That's news to me.

Guide: Are you sure? Everyone's talking about it; it was even on CNN last night.

Tourists: [mumbling among themselves] CNN? Whoa.

Guide: Well, it's not true.

South Park: The episode "Cartmanland", where Eric Cartman buys an amusement park for the sole purpose of keeping people out and having it all to himself. He might have gotten away with it if he hadn't aired commercials extolling the park and then stating no one could come. The commercials drew people's attention to the park, and rising expenses, like security to keep them out, forced him to have to let more and more people in, turning the park from a financial failure into a success. Not that Cartman cared. In "The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs", the kids become enthusiastic about having to read The Catcher in the Rye after finding out it was banned in some schools and supposedly inspired people to kill celebrities. When they actually read the book, however, they're annoyed that it's a normal novel with the occasional curse word.

In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Squid on Strike", Squidward's protests against the Krusty Krab only brought more publicity and so more customers to the Krusty Krab. He actually helped drum up business by going on strike, and Mr. Krabs thanks him for it: Squidward: Nobody gives a care about the fate of labor as long as they get their instant gratification.

Real life examples:

The Trope Namer





The photo in question was taken by Kenneth Adelman, as part of the



The next part is where Streisand took issue.



Adelman took more than twelve thousand photos for the geological study. One of these twelve thousand photos just so happened to capture Barbra Streisand's house, since it overlooked the California coastline. The picture wasn't identified as Streisand's house in any form, but Streisand sued Adelman anyway for violation of privacy. At this point, the Internet imp of the perverse was roused, and now everyone wanted to see the photo that Streisand didn't want them to see. After all, if Streisand lawyered up because of an image, that image must be something worth suing over, right? But when it was revealed that the offending photo was just an innocuous picture of her house — far from anything that could be called scandalous — news of the photo's existence spread far and wide, with others mirroring it onto multiple websites as a note As a matter of historical note: before the public was made aware of the lawsuit, the image of Streisand's house had been downloaded only six times, and two of those downloads were Streisand and her attorneys. After the suit was brought to the public's attention, the image was downloaded over four hundred thousand times in just the following month.



The way that Streisand shot herself in the foot cannot be overstated enough. The study was a mundane project that was only of interest to geologists, who didn't know (and didn't care) who owned the houses in the pictures they were studying, as it wasn't important to their findings. Adelman had not identified the house in the photo as Streisand's — in fact, he hadn't identified anyone's houses in the thousands of pictures he took, since he didn't know who the houses belonged to, either. The only way the public at large found out that the house in the photo was Streisand's was the lawsuit Streisand herself had filed that was specifically designed to prevent that information from getting out. Streisand making a big fuss over her house being in an utterly mundane scientific study made it so that the greater public now knew where she lived, what her house looked like, and that she was acting like a foolish



Basically, had Streisand kept quiet about the photo of her house, nobody would've ever known about it. But specifically because she didn't, the information about her house spread further than it ever would have if she'd done nothing at all.



Ultimately, Streisand lost her lawsuit against Adelman, and was required to pay the legal fees for both sides, which totaled over $150,000. The website detailing all of the pictures from the coastal study is still up, with Image 3850 While this effect has been around for a very long time , the trope is named for American singer Barbra Streisand , who filed a lawsuit attempting to suppress a photograph taken of her house in 2003. The resulting attention brought to the photo because of this lawsuit named the effect in the public consciousness at large (and thus, this trope).The photo in question was taken by Kenneth Adelman, as part of the California Coastal Records Project , a government-commissioned photographic study of the entire coastline of the state of California that was explicitly for geological study. Helicopter photos were taken of the coast, with one photo captured every 500 feet. At the time, with Google Earth still in its infancy as a private subscription service, the record was a rather unique collection of images.The next part is where Streisand took issue.Adelman took more than twelve thousand photos for the geological study. One of these twelve thousand photos just so happened to capture Barbra Streisand's house, since it overlooked the California coastline. The picture wasn't identified as Streisand's house in any form, but Streisand sued Adelman anyway for violation of privacy. At this point, the Internet imp of the perverse was roused, and now everyone wanted to see the photo that Streisand didn't want them to see. After all, if Streisand lawyered up because of an image, that image must be something worth suing over, right? But when it was revealed that the offending photo was just an innocuous picture of her house — far from anything that could be called scandalous — news of the photo's existence spread far and wide, with others mirroring it onto multiple websites as a Take That! towards Streisand.The way that Streisand shot herself in the foot cannot be overstated enough. The study was a mundane project that was only of interest to geologists, who didn't know (and didn't care) who owned the houses in the pictures they were studying, as it wasn't important to their findings. Adelman had not identified the house in the photo as Streisand's — in fact, he hadn't identified anyone's houses in the thousands of pictures he took, since he didn't know who the houses belonged to, either. The only way the public at large found out that the house in the photo was Streisand's was the lawsuit Streisand herself had filed that was specifically designed to prevent that information from getting out. Streisand making a big fuss over her house being in an utterly mundane scientific study made it so that the greater public now knew where she lived, what her house looked like, and that she was acting like a foolish Prima Donna about the whole situation.Basically, had Streisand kept quiet about the photo of her house, nobody would've ever known about it. But specifically because she didn't, the information about her house spread further than it ever would have if she'd done nothing at all.Ultimately, Streisand lost her lawsuit against Adelman, and was required to pay the legal fees for both sides, which totaled over $150,000. The website detailing all of the pictures from the coastal study is still up, with Image 3850 still there , now identified as Streisand's house. The website also has an archive of the legal proceedings surrounding the offending photo, links to news stories and political cartoons mocking Streisand's complaint as a Frivolous Lawsuit , and a note essentially telling Streisand to mind her own business.

Advertising

Anime and Manga

Arts

A very odd example from South Africa. In May 2012, an art exhibition was held in Johannesburg called Hail to the Thief II, which featured art by a local artist named Brett Murray. One of his paintings was called The Spear, which depicted President Jacob Zuma in a pose similar to Victor Ivanov's Lenin Lived, Lenin is Alive, Lenin Will Live, only Zuma's genitals were exposed. A newspaper, City Press, ran a story of the exhibition, and printed the picture and placed it on their website. For close to a week, nothing happened; then Zuma's party, the ANC, threatened to take the Goodman Gallery to court while publicly condemning the painting and demanding that City Press remove the image from their website. Because of the growing hostile response from Zuma supporters and the ruling party itself, the painting got duplicated in newspapers and websites around the world. It even led to the creation of a Wikipedia page with the offending painting right at the top.

This had a bizarre repeat the following year, when a Grade 12 art student's unsympathetic portrayal of ANC leaders  a set of single-print (ie. not for sale) T-shirts on display at a small local mall along with all of the other Grade 12 final art projects  went from being seen by a couple of hundred locals, total, to getting a minor showing in the national news .

. A notable "reverse Streisand effect": In 2017, the city council of Charlottesville, Virginia voted to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee due to his support for the Confederacy. A rally that August by a group of white supremacists against the statue's removal ultimately ended in a vehicular attack that killed one woman. The uproar over this death led to a movement to take down more memorials of the Confederacy, with a statue in Durham, North Carolina being toppled over by protesters and Baltimore removing four monuments during the middle of the night.

Comedy

One of Dara Ó Briain's stand-up routines discusses the briefing notes he sometimes gets when he does corporate gigs for particular organizations which ask him not to mention certain things. Asking a comedian not to mention something, as he notes, is like "a red flag to a bull". He also points out that most of the time he wouldn't even have considered mentioning whatever he was asked not to mention in the first place if the extremely vague reasons why he shouldn't mention it hadn't made him all the more curious about it. He actually had to deal with an incident like this on Mock the Week where the executive producer ordered the comedians not to mention the blindness of a politician who the executive producer was friends with. Cue 5 minutes of jokes only about his blindness.

Bill Bailey had a similar bit about the Swiss investment bank UBS prohibiting corporate stand-up gigs from making cracks about Nazi Gold. So Bailey walked on, mimed asking to open a pension, and when asked with what currency he replies "Naaaaaaaazzzzzziiii Goooooooooold! Just like YOU did!".

Parodied by Gilbert Gottfried during the roast of Bob Saget, where he repeatedly and vehemently insisted that a rumor that BOB SAGET RAPED AND KILLED A GIRL IN 1990 was not true, despite the fact that there is no such rumor.

Comic Books

When Don Rosa retired from working on the Disney Ducks Comic Universe, he wrote an essay for the last of the Egmont Don Rosa Collection series of hardcovers explaining why. This was due to a combination of failing eyesight, emotional exhaustion, and disgruntlement over Disney's continued refusal to offer their comics creators anything more than a low page-rate and, when forced, minimal credits. Disney refused to allow the essay to be included in the books, which caused Rosa to put it online . As he says on the linked page, this probably resulted in far more people reading the essay than if it had been published in a high-priced book aimed at hardcore fans and comics collectors.

. As he says on the linked page, this probably resulted in far more people reading the essay than if it had been published in a high-priced book aimed at hardcore fans and comics collectors. At the 2019 Biennial Book Fair in Rio de Janeiro, some Moral Guardian with too much time in their hands found the hardcover version of The Children's Crusade, and therein the scene where Teddy and Billy kiss as the former proposes to the latter (which consisted of a grand total of two pages). Posting the image on the internet was enough to get the attention of the city's conservative Neopentecostal Mayor, Marcelo Crivella, who then attempted to take the album out of circulation completely. Crivella even threatened to cancel the Book Fair's license outright, arguing that The Children's Crusade is a work with "sexual content" and "unsafe for children", who he also argued was the primary target demographic. All this for two pages in a hardcover collection containing nine full issues. Even when Crivella's attempts to ban the book failed — the Supreme Court ruled against this decision on the grounds of unconstitutional censorship — he went so far as to send city office inspectors to the Book Fair to confiscate every copy of The Children's Crusade they could find. To Crivella's horror, the inspectors reported that the album had sold out overnight in response to his threats. Whoops.

Films — Live-Action

Food

Anthony Sbarro, owner of the mall pizza chain Sbarro, praised the negative feedback that rated Sbarro as some of the worst chain restaurants in the United States in that the taste and quality of their pizzas never amounted to the smell permeating throughout the shopping malls. He openly stated the harsh criticisms helped his brand gain attention and increased publicity and sales at his pizza shops.

Deliberately invoked with US West Coast sandwich chain Ike's Love & Sandwiches. The titular Ike received a cease-and-desist letter from KFC after using the phrase "finger-licking good" on his restaurants' mission statement on their walls. In response, he put black tape over (part of) the phrase, photocopied the cease-and-desist notice, and taped it at eye level next to the mission statement on the wall. note You cannot be sued for publicly showing a cease-and-desist notice, as long as you don't comment on it. He then did this with every Ike's location, and when new ones open, he writes the same censored mission statement—with the phrase "finger-licking good" written before being taped up—and a new photocopy of the cease-and-desist taped nearby. This was done to ensure every customer of Ike's Love & Sandwiches will know of KFC's legal action against the chain—and since "Finger-Lickin' Good" was written on the cease-and-desist, anyone who reads it can figure out what the censored phrase actually was.

History

The Tranby Croft Affair, which was used as inspiration for Moonraker by Ian Fleming, was a card-cheating scandal in 1890. Arthur Wilson, friend of Prince Albert Edward (the future King Edward VII), held a dinner party for Edward's friends and retainers. One of them, Sir William Gordon-Cumming of the Scots Guard, was caught cheating during an illegal game of baccarat. He signed an agreement never to play cards again in exchange for everyone's silence, but word quickly got out. Gordon-Cumming attempted to sue for slander, which led to all of the witness accounts of his cheating being publicized across the United Kingdom and the first time an heir to the throne had been called to the witness stand since 1411. The scandal caused Gordon-Cumming to be dismissed from the army and kicked out of all of his clubs.

In 1972, Siemens, a German megacorporation, sued a German satirist for writing a satirical history of the company. The trial ultimately brought much more attention to the company's sordid history during World War Two: using forced Jewish labor in their factories to supply electrical parts to Nazi concentration camps and death camps. note In 2020, Siemens has a net worth of $150 billion.

Literature

The Vatican's Index of Forbidden Books (Index Librorum Prohibitorum; created in 1557, during the Reformation) was a list of books which good Catholics were not supposed to read, including works by Protestant theologians, some scientific writings, etc. Naturally, it backfired  it tended to be used as a reading list, and the printers used it as a guide on what to print next.

Nicolaus Copernicus's book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (advancing a heliocentric universe) was put on the Vatican's index of forbidden books in 1616 and was followed less than a year later with a new edition. Not bad for a technical textbook that had been out of print for 60 years prior.

Lynne Cheney, wife of Dick, wrote a novel in 1981 called Sisters, featuring sexual content and lesbianism  her attempts to prevent a 2006 reprint actually helped publicize it.

McDonald's sued a small activist group over a flier being passed out at one of its restaurants, that alleged certain wrongdoings by the fast food chain. If left alone, only a couple hundred people may have seen it. However, the trial ended up taking over a decade and got international media attention. After spending millions on lawyers, McDonald's was awarded £60,000 in damage from the activists.

After spending millions on lawyers, McDonald's was awarded £60,000 in damage from the activists. Fox's lawsuit against Al Franken over his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, claimed that the title infringed on the "Fair and Balanced" slogan of the Fox News Channel. Franken and his supporters still insist the real man behind the lawsuit was Bill O'Reilly for what Franken said about him in the book. News of the lawsuit caused the book to shoot up to Amazon's number one seller before it was even officially released. As for the suit  many of the plaintiff's arguments were met with actual laughter in the courtroom, and Fox withdrew the suit at the judge's recommendation.

A minor example from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the author of the worst poetry in the universe is named in the original radio show as "Paul Neil Milne Johnstone of Redbridge, Essex"  a former schoolmate of Douglas Adams, who wrote deliberately terrible poetry and who respectfully asked that his name and location be removed from the book adaptations. Thus people now ask why the name changed from Paul to a 'Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings' in Sussex in subsequent versions and discover the story of where Adams got the idea from.

Older Than Feudalism: In one of his moral treatises, Seneca speaks of a house on the coast that was the property of Caligula, which was destroyed by that emperor because his mother was detained as a prisoner by the former emperor Tiberius. Seneca related that when strangers saw the house, they didn't pay any attention to it, but since Caligula left only ruins, all were interested to know its history.

Dr. Jose Rizal's famous novel Noli Me Tangere, whose controversial content earned the ire of the Spanish Friars, caused the latter to declare that anyone reading it would be charged with heresy and be excommunicated. This only caused the local populace to become curious, causing sales to skyrocket.

Many libraries and bookstores invoke this during Banned Books Week, putting up displays of frequently banned books and prompting kids to read them to see what all the fuss is about.

putting up displays of frequently banned books and prompting kids to read them to see what all the fuss is about. Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses was selling a few hundred copies a week until the fatwa against Rushdie. Afterwards, it became so popular that it sold five times more copies than the #2 best-seller. It's still the publisher's best-selling book of all time.

In 2018, Fariña, a book by journalist Nacho Carretero documenting drug dealing cases in Galicia in the '90s, was seized by court order after a former mayor mentioned in the book sued Carretero for damages. That very week, the book became a bestseller on Amazon Spain and the premiere episode of the TV series based on it  which was not affected by the court order since the judge considered the script of the series was unknown and the airing date was uncertain  was promoted for a preview release.

Bob Klapish's book on the 1992 Mets, The Worst Team Money Could Buy: The Collapse of the New York Mets, got unexpected publicity when Klapish was involved in an incident with one of the team's under-performing players. Bobby Bonilla, who was acquired by the Pirates the previous year and had frequently clashed with the New York media, threatened physical violence on Klapish and had to be restrained by his teammates. As it reflected an accurate portrayal of the Mets at that point, sales of the book skyrocketed.

The Literary Review magazine has a yearly "Bad Sex in Fiction" award, meant to poke fun at instances of IKEA Erotica or Mills and Boon Prose. Pretty much every other year it happens, one of the nominated authors ends up getting angry at them and very publically demanding their removal from the list or insulting the magazine for its raunchy attitude or attempt to depreciate their art. These affairs also have a habit of reaching mainstream outlets - both exposing a rather niche magazine to a much bigger audience, and putting a spotlight on sections in the author's book where they wrote "turgid meat stick" or broke anatomy.

In 1855, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass contained apparent references to masturbation, homosexuality, and other sex acts. Literature magazine The Criterion called it "a mass of stupid filth," and another reviewer told Whitman that he should kill himself for writing it. It was even banned outright in Boston before it was published. However, Leaves sold out the day it was released, mostly from people wanting to find out just what all the fuss was about.

Happened in the late '10s in South African politics, regarding the publication of unflattering non-fiction books. The President's Keepers came out in late 2017 and was an exposé on then-president Jacob Zuma and the alleged corruption he and many of the ANC party was involved in. Zuma and his loyalist criticized the book and proposed banning it (which isn't allowed by the post-1994 South African constitution). This caused the book to not only get sold out for several printings but anti-Zuma people began spreading the book illegally through social media. The publication of the book and its spread through social media was a major blow against Zuma, and eventually, he had to resign as president. Gangster State was launched in April 2019 and was a take-down on Ace Magashule, Secretary General of the ANC Party and possible presidential contender. When the book was launched, having learned absolutely nothing from the President's Keepers affair, Magashule loyalists said they'd burn the book, then stormed a book launch and destroyed several copies. The book, which didn't have that much interest up until that point, sold out immediately and illegal PDF's were disseminated across social media again.



Live-Action TV

Music

After the release of the Queen song "Death on Two Legs (Dedicated to...)", former band manager Norman Sheffield decided to sue for defamation, despite the fact that he was never mentioned by name. He succeeded only in informing the world whom the song's scathing insults were targeting.

Metallica's hardline stance on peer-to-peer downloading resulted only in their songs becoming even more widely pirated. Other bands were hit by this to a lesser degree.

Drake averts this to the point where he almost inverts this. Even though both of his albums have been leaked ahead of time, he usually is okay with it, though his record company is not as happy.

After it was personally banned by one of its personalities (who interrupted a chart rundown to point out its Double Entendre-laden lyrics), "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood was banned by the BBC. Two weeks later, it was the number-one song in the UK.

One Direction: Fans shipped Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson and nobody thought much of it. Then all public contact between the two suddenly stopped and they awkwardly denied it a few times. Now the fans have entire essays of compiled evidence that they are actually in a relationship that their management covers up. There was also the time an article praised Louis for supporting the LGBT community and angry tweets came from his Twitter account saying he wasn't gay. Later on, Zayn, who hasn't even spoken to them in months, was asked about fans invading his privacy and he randomly said that Harry and Louis weren't together. Okay, guys.

When Tipper Gore announced that she was trying to censor 2 Live Crew's music in the late '80s, their music became even more popular. Tipper Gore and the PMRC, in general, were the Streisand Effect of the '80s; almost every band they went after for inappropriate lyrics and whatnot ended up becoming even more popular due to the publicity. In particular, one of the PMRC's biggest targets, WASP, saw their record sales double and vocalist Black Lawless was all too happy to use them as a vehicle to promote the band. Finally, like the Eminem example below, during one awards speech, Steven Tyler thanked Tipper Gore for ensuring that if an album had a few dirty words on it, it would sell an extra million copies.

After some radio stations banned Billy Joel's "Only the Good Die Young" due to its perceived anti-Catholic message, the album it was on — The Stranger — shot up the charts.

An example of genre savviness; Eminem, after receiving an award for his breakthrough album, publicly thanked all the people who threw a shit-fit over the album for making it a hit.

Similarly, after Alice Cooper's "School's Out" hit #1 in the UK, he sent notorious Moral Guardian Mary Whitehouse a bunch of flowers. Whitehouse had successfully campaigned for the song to be banned from the BBC's chart show Top of the Pops, and Cooper believed the ensuing publicity had helped it top the chart.

"Weird Al" Yankovic benefits from this from time to time due to his parody songs. While Yankovic legally doesn't need permission to record a parody, he still makes it a personal rule to get permission anyway in order to maintain good relations in the music industry. However, rejections of permission can sometimes help his songs become bigger than approval: Coolio's anger over "Amish Paradise", Yankovic's parody of "Gangsta's Paradise", helped make the song a bigger hit. Yankovic thought he did have permission due to a miscommunication, and Coolio's anger over the whole situation made fans more attracted to the song. Before Straight Outta Lynwood was released, "You're Pitiful", a parody of James Blunt's "You're Beautiful", was set to be the lead single. James Blunt approved of it, but at the last minute, Blunt's label, Atlantic Records, changed their mind, and "White and Nerdy" became the lead single instead. As a result, Yankovic released "You're Pitiful" for free and performs it on tour, mocking Atlantic in the process. Due to the backlash and the video for "White and Nerdy", the Other Wiki had to lock Atlantic's page to prevent Yankovic's angry fans from defacing it. "Perform This Way", Yankovic's parody of Lady Gaga's "Born This Way", looked to be a case of this at first — he wasn't given permission to publish it, so he put it up on YouTube instead and it became an immediate sensation. It became such a sensation, in fact, that it eventually came to the notice of Lady Gaga herself, who hadn't actually been consulted on the original decision. She thought it was hilarious and gave Yankovic the go-ahead.

When the Sex Pistols released "God Save the Queen" in 1977, both the BBC and the IBA refused to broadcast the song. It quickly reached number one on the singles chart. However, doubt and controversy remain as to whether "God Save the Queen" actually did get to #1. Officially, Rod Stewart's "I Don't Want to Talk About It" (no pun intended) was number one that week. However, well-founded allegations persist that the charts were doctored by BBC and recording company executives, fearful for their chances of retiring with knighthoods.

The BBC expressed concern following the scurrilous and seditious popularity of a re-release of "Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead!" note from the soundtrack of The Wizard of Oz , which celebrates the passing of the Wicked Witch of the East Margaret Thatcher. The song was subject to a campaign to get it to number one on the singles chart for the occasion; it made it to #2, but the BBC refused to play it, even in the relevant Radio One Chart Show.

Margaret Thatcher. The song was subject to a campaign to get it to number one on the singles chart for the occasion; it made it to #2, but the BBC refused to play it, even in the relevant Radio One Chart Show. In 1991, at the CMA awards, the video of the year went to Garth Brooks, "The Thunder Rolls". In his speech, he thanked TNN and CMT for having banned the video and brought attention to it.

Beck used to end interviews angrily if the subject of him being involved with the Church of Scientology was brought up. Back in the '90s, this wasn't widely known, nor was it publicized. But due to his reactions, his connection with the church and attempts to suppress it became one of the most identifiable things about him. He has since become a bit more comfortable about this due to the fact that he knows that his fans are mostly accepting of it, but he still leaves huge gaps when talking about his childhood.

Madonna made frequent use of this between 1989-1993, from the moment that her 1989 video for "Like a Prayer" resulted in her partnership with Pepsi being terminated (causing the single to hit #1 on the Hot 100 and become one of her all-time biggest selling singles). In 1990, the music video for "Justify My Love" was banned by MTV. The music video was subsequently sold on VHS, ultimately becoming certified 4x platinum. The single also shot to #1 on the Hot 100. Her 1992 album Erotica and photo book Sex were also big sellers, both fueled by the controversy and public backlash.

In 2016, Axl Rose filed quite a few DCMA copyright notices with Google, asking that "unflattering" photos (taken of him at a 2010 concert by Winnipeg Free Press photographer Boris Minkevich) be removed from circulation on the Internet, as it had inspired the so-called "Fat Axl" meme. Predictably, this news has caused the "Fat Axl" meme (which has existed quietly since at least 2011) to explode. Welcome to the jungle, indeed.

This happened to Bill O'Reilly a couple of times when he decided to go after rap music in the early 2000s. When he went after Ludacris, who became popular during the rise of Southern rap, he elevated him to superstar status and made him one of the biggest music stars of that decade. It also didn't help that soon afterwards, news came out about O'Reilly getting sued for sexual harassment, a problem that kept growing over time and led to his eventual firing from Fox News Channel many years later. Another example happened during an interview with rapper Cam'ron and rap manager Damon Dash. O'Reilly got visibly upset when Dash made a point about rap music encouraging positive work ethics. Cam'ron pointed this out during the show, and this led to the "U Mad" meme that is still popularly used to this day. Needless to say, O'Reilly's attempt to get people from supporting rap music had the complete opposite effect.

In September 2017, a small blog named PopFront published an article suggesting a Taylor Swift song contained alt-right dog whistles. It received exactly one comment until two months later, when Swift's lawyer sent them an angry letter demanding they take the post down, and that they also couldn't publish said angry letter because it was copyrighted. Naturally, PopFront published it. This led to a bunch of very large blogs picking up the story, the ACLU getting involved, and many, many more people ended up seeing the article.

In October 2017, William Francis (the former lead singer of Aiden who was performing as the solo act William Control) abruptly dropped out of a tour and returned home, citing a desire to cease his relentless touring and producing schedule to focus on his family and record company. Around that time, a (now deleted) Tumblr blog had posted evidence and accounts from various women and young girls stating that he had been luring mentally-ill women into abusive BDSM relationships in which he ignored boundaries to rape, beat, and extort them. This blog remained virtually unknown until June 2018, when he publicly addressed the accusations and suddenly shut down Control Records while going dark on all social media. This only attracted further attention to the blog as fans Googled the accusations, with his victims also posting screenshots of messages from Will threatening them and saying that they'd never be believed (along with accusations that he was actually making his money through pimping and extortion and using his merchandise business as a legal cover). The blog even reposted statements from his wife explaining that she had knowledge of the offenses and divorced him over it. This resulted in a police investigation across two continents; while he faced no charges due to lack of evidence and has restarted his music career, most of the top Google results for him as of January 2019 are articles on his sexual predation and both his personal and act Wikipedia pages include the information, ensuring that any potential new fans will see it as soon as they look him up.

Linkin Park recorded a number of in-house demo CDs in the run-up to their Hybrid Theory album, one of which included a mellow song called "She Couldn't", which the group never released partly because it heavily used a sample they could not get the rights to use, and partly because it was too soft for the edgy sound the group had at the time. After the leak, Mike Shinoda mentioned the song on a blog post but was soon forced to take it down by the label. As a result, fans have continued to widely share the song and note its influence on their later work.

Notably averted with Radiohead in 2019 when 18 hours of OK Computer sessions were copied and leaked online by someone who had been involved with the band during the "OK Not OK" reissue period. They had previously tried to extort money from the band thinking that the group would want to suppress the material in this manner. In reality, the opposite happened - Thom Yorke officially released the material as a download, in higher quality than the leaks, on the condition that the proceeds went to charity.

Deliberately invoked by David Bowie in the 70s when he started touring America as Ziggy Stardust. He announced that he would be doing no radio interviews and went everywhere surrounded by bodyguards trying to keep him from the public gaze. This ended up attracting a huge amount of attention...Which was exactly his aim.

The Clash's final album Cut the Crap turned out to be so disastrous when it was released, that lead singer Joe Strummer broke up the band shortly after its release and declared it to be an Old Shame. As a result, the album has been treated as an Un-person. Any box sets of The Clash omit Cut the Crap with the exception of its only single "This is England", and any history books or documentaries about them makes suspiciously little reference to this album compared to others. Of course, all of this particular Un-person treatment has caused a lot of people to become very curious about the album as a result... even if they do end up seeing why...

The version of "Louie Louie" performed by The Kingsmen was recorded with absolutely no budget, with the band members huddled around a single microphone. There was even a mistake that was left in due to said lack of budget. The end result was a recording where you couldn't even make out the lyrics, and it was seemingly destined for obscurity. That was, until someone complained that the song's lyrics were obscene; the FBI ended up investigating, eventually concluding that the song was "unintelligible at any speed". note ironically though, you can hear the drummer faintly yell " Fuck! " around 51 seconds in.

Music Videos

The music video for the Childish Gambino song "This is America" has been subject to countless memes, despite (or perhaps because of) its intense, politically-charged nature. Vice Media, among others, took exception to this, telling people to stop and lambasting them for ignoring the point of the song and video. Vice Media is already a controversial media outlet in various pockets of the internet, so there were those who were more than happy to further make fun of the video, either because they learned about it through Vice, or to spite them. Or both.

New Media

Podcasts

At a gathering of animators and animation personalities, Rubber Onion co-host Stephen Brooks snapped a particularly unflattering photo of John Kricfalusi looking disheveled and clammy-skinned. Kricfalusi outright demanded that Brooks not share any photos of him without his expressed permission, despite Brooks being the event's hired photographer. In turn, Brooks, who was already not fond of Kricfalusi, used the photo as the thumbnail for the episode of his podcast discussing Kricfalusi's then-recent statutory rape allegations , complete with a subtitle saying "John K. told me not to take his picture without his consent."

Print Media

Suing Private Eye for libel never does anyone any good. All it does is draw out the Eye's story and attract the attention of other news sources. Even if you win, no one has enough faith in British libel law (or the Eye's ability to defend a case) to believe that this means it isn't true.

Protests against depictions of Muhammad in print media have had this effect in Western society: In 2005, Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a series of editorial cartoons depicting Muhammad , which caused deadly riots and protests. In response, other Western publications also ran the cartoons as a defense of free speech. In 2015, the French magazine Charlie Hebdo was attacked by terrorists in response to repeated depictions of Muhammad. Before the attack, the magazine was virtually unknown outside of France, as it only managed to sell about 30,000 copies and was sliding into bankruptcy. For their next issue, demand caused Charlie Hebdo to print seven million copies, and #JeSuisCharlie (French for "I am Charlie") trended worldwide as a show of solidarity. Furthermore, the attacks sparked massive support for the publication and caused the offending cartoons to be seen worldwide across the Internet.

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff details what he heard and saw spending a year in the Donald Trump White House. People weren't too interested in it, but when Trump's lawyers tried putting out a cease & desist order on it, the publisher decided to move up the release date to midnight the day after the order was issued. Unsurprisingly, the book sold out in stores across the country , launching to the top of the best-sellers list.

Tabletop Games

There is a real chance that if it weren't for Patricia Pulling and her campaign against Dungeons & Dragons, the game would have remained a niche market and probably never would have become the geekdom rite of passage it has become. This also had a run in 1980 with the disappearance of James Egbert III, a young man who played the game. The detective assigned to Egbert's disappearance wrote a book about it, suggesting the game had something to do Egbert going missing. It didn't, and Egbert was eventually found alive and unhurt. Still, Dungeons and Dragons went from grossing $2.3 million in 1979 to $8.7 million in 1980, largely as a result of all the negative press denouncing it as "Satanic propaganda"; many people ended up playing it just to see what all the fuss was about.

In September 2018, ApostleO, a user on reddit, criticized the performance and user interface of the digital tabletop site Roll20, and was then banned by the moderator NolanT from the Roll20 subreddit under assumed sock-puppetry, since they had a name similar to another banned user, ApostleOfTruth. Since ApostleO knew they weren't the same person as ApostleOfTruth, they dug deeper into the issue. ApostleO found that not only were the two users' writing styles not similar at all, the other banned user was banned for criticizing the Roll20 staff's moderation as well. When ApostleO confronted Roll20 about it, they were told by NolanT that even though the two banned users' IPs didn't match, the ban would not be lifted. ApostleO reported what happened on reddit , which reached Reddit's front page. It revealed that Roll20 not only censored any form of criticism towards them, they also violated Reddit's policy of people modding subreddits of a company they are employed to, as NolanT was not just an affiliated mod, but one of Roll20's co-founders. This led to other users declaring that they would also cancel their subscription and/or bad-mouth Roll20 from now on. NolanT's response only made things worse; at one time, NolanT's response was the second-most downvoted comment in the history of Reddit.

Video Games

Web Comics

Penny Arcade: Their legal run-in with American Greetings over a Strawberry Shortcake parody image resulted in the image being spread across the Internet on such a wide basis that it's very easy to find the image nowadays, even though it's no longer on the Penny Arcade site. To this day, Archive Bingers are taking note of AG's overly-protective legal department. Given the near-universal demographic and high fungibility of the greeting card industry, it's safe to say that they're still losing the occasional sale to it. Not to mention the Ocean Marketing debacle : Paul Christoforo, the president of a PR and distribution firm named Ocean Marketing, sent unkind, unprofessional, and terribly written emails out to several customers of N-Control, a company that manufactures and sells the Avenger Controller, a modified PS3 controller designed with folks with fine motor impairment in mind. Paul made unsubstantiated claims of how soon the controllers would ship out, lowered the price to attract new customers while not even offering the customers who would be waiting for several more weeks a ten percent compensatory discount, eventually started addressing disgruntled customers by telling them their business in a condescending tone, threatened to cancel an order placed by at least one customer and sell the controllers on eBay himself, and went around claiming to know head editors at gaming news blogs like IGN and Kotaku, to try to deflect complaints by making himself seem like an important figure. Dave, one customer unlucky enough to have dealt with him, shared the series of email correspondence with Gabe himself, who stepped in to tell Paul that Ocean Marketing would not be welcome at PAX any longer — something Paul was initially disbelieving of, since he had no idea who he was talking to, at first. He made an about-face when he realized just how tremendous his mistake was, but by the time he connected the dots, it was already too late. That one series of emails set off a chain reaction that effectively killed Ocean Marketing and, with it, Paul's career. As the dust began settling, it became obvious Paul wasn't genuinely sorry for how he behaved — he was just sorry he got caught lying to, verbally abusing, and cheating N-Control's customers.

Christian Weston Chandler, creator of Sonichu, was initially just a random comic artist with big, yet child-like, dreams. The effect kicked in after a random encounter with a member of 4chan led to the creation of an Encyclopedia Dramatica page about him. His attempts to get rid of it, and the incidents it caused on the Internet and in real life, would lead to more people to find out more about this man and his creation. And a whole lot more, but that's a completely different story.

Web Original

Western Animation