Watching the Yes Men Save the World got me interested in the Yes Men’s story. This led me to read up on their projects and even download their movie. All the while, I was thinking, the ones who wanted to prevent the Yes Men from spreading the movie must be kicking themselves. Instead of successfully making the movie unavailable by calling out intellectual property violations, they only succeeded at driving the makers to distribute it for free via file sharing in order to further their cause. People are now in a better position to access said material and the fact that it’s controversial just piques the interest of many more.
I observed that this happens quite often on the internet. Whenever a person seeks to prevent the spread of certain material, attempts to do such bring about opposite results. Finally, I came across an article which mentioned the term “The Streisand Effect”, which is exactly what this interesting phenomenon is.
The Streisand Effect is described as when a person, often a celebrity, tries to have a piece of information censored or removed, only to have it backfire and cause the information to receive much more attention than it was previously receiving. Yes, it is named after the singer because she apparently tried censoring stuff on the internet too, but failed miserably as it spread even more.
The Streisand Effect can happen not only to movies, but also to articles, pictures, wall posts or anything you can take a screen cap of. People have a way of preserving things on the internet, whether it be legal or not. This is another proof of how things take on a life of their own once they get on the internet.
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