Streisand Effect

For John, BLUF:  Sometimes the knee jerk reaction is not the best in a sticky situation.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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MIT:  Twitter Ban ‘Nearly Doubled’ The Visibility Of Hunter Biden Laptop Story

From Wired, by Ms Emily Zanotti, 19 October 2020.

Here is the lede plus three:

Twitter’s crackdown on a controversial New York Post story that “purported to show new emails from Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, about his business dealings while Joe Biden was the vice president in the Obama administration,” “nearly doubled” the story’s visibility and triggered the so-called “Streisand Effect,” amplifying the Post’s claims, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a high-profile media intelligence firm.

“When Twitter banned, and then unbanned, links to a questionably sourced New York Post article about Joe Biden’s son Hunter, its stated intention was to prevent people from spreading harmful false material as America heads into the final stretch of the election campaign,” MIT’s Technology Review reported Monday.  “But thanks to the cycle of misinformation—and claims from conservatives that social-media platforms are deliberately censoring their views—Twitter managed to do the opposite of what it intended.”

In fact, Twitter’s efforts triggered a massive spike in interest in the story.  “According to Zignal Labs, a media intelligence firm, shares of the Post article ‘nearly doubled’ after Twitter started suppressing it,” MIT noted.

The incident was a real-time example of what Zignal Lab’s calls the “Streisand Effect” — a “social phenomenon that occurs when an attempt to hide, remove or censor information has the unintended consequence of further publicizing that information, often via the Internet,” according to Wikipedia.  The name comes from singer Barbra Streisand’s efforts, in 2003, to suppress a photo of her Malibu, California, residence over security concerns.

That is the good news.  And why we have to fight every attempt to "control" the World Wide Web.

As to the issue of if The New York Post was spreading false information, evidence indicates that this Hunter Biden EMail trove is being verified as true from more than one source.

For those who think they are not getting the full sweep of information when they do on-line searchs, consideration might be given to replacing the "Google" Search Engine with an alterntive, such as "DuckDuckGo" or "Bing" (a Microsoft alterntive).  And, there are others.

It may be interesting to follow the Senate Hearings on Twitter's intervention in the Election Campaign.  Don't expect much from the House of Representatives.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff