The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [70]
In fact, an entire organization called WikiLeaks has been built to ensure that all controversial documents that someone wants to get off the Web have a dedicated and well-protected place to stay online. Even the omnipotent American military are finding it hard to take sensitive content off the Internet, as they discovered when WikiLeaks released the video of a 2007 Baghdad air strike that killed several Reuters news staffers as well as a trove of documents related to the war in Afghanistan.
The logic behind the Streisand Effect, however, does not have much to do with the Internet. Throughout history there has hardly been a more effective way to ensure that people talk about something than to ban discussions about it. Herostratus, a young Greek man who in 356 BCE set fire to the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, may be the world’s first documented case of the Streisand Effect. Herostratus’s ultimate punishment—that is, in addition to being executed—was for his act to be forgotten, on strict orders from the Ephesean authorities, who banned anyone from ever mentioning his name. And here we are, discussing the story of this narcissistic pyromaniac thousands of years later (the Ephesean authorities could not foresee that Herostratus would be immortalized on his own Wikipedia page).
Even though it’s publicity-conscious Hollywood stars, corporations, and activist organizations that are most troubled by the Streisand Effect, authoritarian governments are worried as well. For most of their existence, authoritarian governments believed—and not without good reason—they could control the spread of information by limiting access to publishing tools and tracking how they were being used by those with access. Nicolae Ceauşescu, the cruel dictator who ruled Romania from 1965 to 1989, made it a crime to own typewriters without registering them. At one point he even considered getting every Romanian to submit a handwriting sample. This was his way of preventing mass correspondence between his citizens and Western media like Radio Free Europe (nevertheless, even such drastic measures couldn’t stop all the letters).
When the costs of trafficking in information—whether financial or reputational—are too high, there are fewer opportunities to spread it around; the Streisand Effect is not likely to undermine official information flows. But when almost everyone has access to cheap means of self-publishing as well as concealing their identity, the Streisand Effect becomes a real threat. It often renders traditional forms of censorship counterproductive. Most political bloggers start salivating at the thought of starving the government’s censorship beast by reproducing what the government wants to ban.
But it would be wrong to conclude that the Streisand Effect means the demise of information control. Censors can simply switch to other, less obvious, and less intrusive means of minimizing the negative impact of the information being spread online. Instead of censoring it—which, in many cases, could only confer additional credibility on whatever criticism was expressed in the original blog post or article—the government may choose to go for the Spinternet option: Counter the blog post with effective