The only reliable way to make sure everybody on the Internet sees something is to have your lawyer demand that nobody on the Internet be allowed to see something. It's called the "Streisand Effect" (you'll soon see why) and it's been the bane of publicists since 2003. Read on to see things that lawyers don't want you to see, although be advised that our lawyers don't want you to see this post and/or share it a billion times on social media.
Barbra Streisand's Ridiculously Giant House
![Streisand house]()
Photographer Kenneth Adelman took thousands of pictures of the California coastline to document erosion, then made them public as part of the California Coastal Records Project. Image 3850, which happened to feature a certain singer's Malibu mansion, had only been downloaded six times before Babs' lawyers sued for violation of privacy (and two of those downloads were by her lawyers to use in the case). After the $50 million lawsuit, Adelman's website was being hit up by over 420,000 visitors each month, all of them determined to look at a fancy house that the law didn't want them to see.
Beyoncé's Super Unflattering Super Bowl
![Beyonce super bowl meme]()
Beyoncé's Super Bowl XLVII halftime show was critically acclaimed by the sort of people who actually watch halftime shows instead of getting more seven-layer dip. One unforeseen snag: because dancing is strenuous, and cameras were everywhere, a handful of the pictures taken of the performance did not meet Queen Bey's standards and her publicist was dispatched to media outlets to ask that nobody show them to millions of people. Displaying great courage in the face of a PR flack's email, journalists paraded the seven pictures around until they got bored. As a result, Beyoncé banned press photographers from her events, relying on her own camera corps. The original seven pictures still circulate on image boards everywhere.
Union Street Guest House's Yelp Backfire
![Union Street Guest House]()
How do you deal with bad PR in an age where any schmuck can leave an online review of your business that just says 1/5 STARS POOP DICK LOL? Not the way the Union Street Guest House did. The fine print on their website indicated that for every negative review posted by renters or their guests, a whopping $500 would be taken out of the renters' deposit. After the policy was discovered and publicized, Union Street Guest House found itself with 15 pages of one-star Yelp reviews, numerous editorials and articles claiming the policy was an attack on free speech, and a Facebook fan page so full of negativity, profanity, and POOP DICK LOL that it was taken down.
Tom Cruise
![Tom Cruise Scientology Video]()
Scientology's tactic of relying on celebrity star power to attract new converts has one obvious flaw: all of their celebrities are crazy as hell. Witness Tom Cruise in a leaked video from 2008 claiming that only Scientologists can reform criminals, end drug addiction, and rescue people from car accidents, a performance so laughably weird that Scientology mobilized every lawyer it had to get it pulled down. The church is very good at frivolous litigation, so YouTube folded quickly, but other sites like the Gawker network held fast. Scientology pitched such a legal fit that the anarchic meme-and-hentai maelstrom known as 4chan developed Project Chanology, a subset of Anonymous dedicated to foiling Scientologist evangelicalism and legal harassment.
Neverseconds Calls Out Sh**ty Lunches
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Remember how awful school lunches were? Thanks to the blog NeverSeconds, the awfulness of one Scottish schoolgirl's lunches will be remembered by the entire Internet. Launched as a writing project by nine-year-old Martha Payne and her dad, the blog tracked the price, quality, healthiness, and amount of hair (thankfully none) in each meal. NeverSeconds proved a surprising hit among those interested in school lunches, like celebrity chef and shit-talker Jamie Oliver.
The blog had hit 3 million views and raised £2000 for Malawi food relief when the local council decided that the photos were bad PR and prohibited Martha from taking pictures. A group of bureaucrats preventing an adorable little girl from reporting on food and raising money for starving children went over about as well as you'd expect, and NeverSeconds blew up overnight, raising £40,000 for Martha's charity and drowning the council in angry tweets, emails, and phone calls. NeverSeconds soon resumed reporting and ended up donating £140,000 to the Mary's Meals organization.
The Motion Picture Association of America's Major Mistake
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The Advanced Access Content System is the official encryption standard used by the Motion Picture Association of America to ensure that in order to watch masterpieces like "Ouija" at home, you have to buy a disc and sit through five unskippable trailers and anti-piracy ads before actually seeing the movie. Unfortunately for the MPAA, all that's needed for clever programmers to create decoding software is a "key" of letters and numbers available on any number of tech websites. When the AACS Licensing Administrator started issuing gag orders and copyright violations, resourceful hackers started proliferating the key in any number of ways: color codes, frequencies, t-shirts, tattoos, and in one 800,000-view YouTube video, a song.
TRAFIGURA
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English law concerning both libel and the freedom of the press is much different from America's, as it is based not on Enlightenment-era legal philosophy but on ancient poems about sheep. This meant oil company Trafigura could file a "super-injunction" that didn't just prevent the Guardian newspaper from reporting on a toxic waste spill that hospitalized thousands of people in the Ivory Coast, but prevented them from reporting they'd been legally prevented from reporting on it.
A helpful Labour MP sidestepped the injunction by asking about it and the waste spill in Parliament, allowing the Guardian to report that they had been barred from reporting about being barred from reporting about something having to do with the waste spill by someone who was connected to it. The British Internet soon filled in the blanks, and soon so much of the information about Trafigura was common knowledge that the super-injunction was deemed useless and the Guardian's report allowed to be published.
McDonald's is McLibel
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Back when the Internet was just a bunch of universities with modems, McDonald's encountered an early version of the Streisand Effect in 1986, when it came down harder than a still-frozen McNugget on London Greenpeace for a derogatory pamphlet McD claimed was libelous. To show these limey upstarts who was boss, McDonalds spent millions of pounds and ten years in court (the longest-running case in English history) and still didn't completely win. The company was only able to show that some of the claims made by the pamphleteers were demonstrably false.
McDonald's even attempted to settle out of court with a charitable donation on the condition that defendants Helen Steel and David Morris never publicly criticize the company again, restricting their criticisms privately to friends. Steel and Morris secretly recorded the meeting and then stated they'd agree if McDonald's ceased advertising and only recommended their food to friends. Mickey D's ended up not even collecting the amount awarded to them at the end of the case, hoping the bad PR would just go away on its own. Today, the McLibel story is a feature-length documentary
Glenn Beck's Potentially Shady Past
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Love him or hate him, there's one thing you can say about Glenn Beck: he has never denied raping and murdering a young girl in 1990. Posing the question as to what (possibly rapine and murderous) activities Glenn Beck was up to in 1990 was an Internet way of mocking Beck's rhetoric, and eventually the phrase became the website GlennBeckRapedAndMurderedAYoungGirlIn1990.com (now defunct). Beck's lawyers hit the site threatening a defamation lawsuit.
When the site stood its ground, they contacted the World Intellectual Property Organization to make the bizarre claim that Glenn Beck's name was copyrighted. All of this just caused more and more people to wonder aloud whether Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990, since now he seemed to be using the law to prevent people from investigating the issue. For a brief time, the first terms Google suggested after "Glenn Beck" were "rape" and "murder," but it seems like it's died down by now, leaving the question still unanswered.
The Interview's Overdramatic Debut
![the interview james franco seth rogen]()
Let's be real: was anyone even the slightest bit interested in this movie before Dear Leader allegedly decided we shouldn't be allowed to see it? Before the massive Sony hack, "The Interview" was all set to become yet another in a long series of Sony-produced flops, and what little publicity Sony had bothered to issue for it was soon overshadowed by those curious about a movie that apparently prompted an international cybersecurity showdown.
Then, when Sony cancelled the national release, everyone blew up: not being able to see Seth Rogen and James Franco dick around for ninety minutes was an assault on American freedom! Dozens of sites pledged to stream the film with or without Sony's permission, and Sony finally relented to officially streaming the film on Netflix and releasing in arthouse theaters Christmas Day. Ironically, many security experts now believe the hack wasn't by North Koreans at all, but by disgruntled IT staff at Sony, or possibly a desperate James Franco hoping against hope to find a way to stop appearing in completely crap movies.
Barbra Streisand's Ridiculously Giant House
Photographer Kenneth Adelman took thousands of pictures of the California coastline to document erosion, then made them public as part of the California Coastal Records Project. Image 3850, which happened to feature a certain singer's Malibu mansion, had only been downloaded six times before Babs' lawyers sued for violation of privacy (and two of those downloads were by her lawyers to use in the case). After the $50 million lawsuit, Adelman's website was being hit up by over 420,000 visitors each month, all of them determined to look at a fancy house that the law didn't want them to see.
Beyoncé's Super Unflattering Super Bowl
Beyoncé's Super Bowl XLVII halftime show was critically acclaimed by the sort of people who actually watch halftime shows instead of getting more seven-layer dip. One unforeseen snag: because dancing is strenuous, and cameras were everywhere, a handful of the pictures taken of the performance did not meet Queen Bey's standards and her publicist was dispatched to media outlets to ask that nobody show them to millions of people. Displaying great courage in the face of a PR flack's email, journalists paraded the seven pictures around until they got bored. As a result, Beyoncé banned press photographers from her events, relying on her own camera corps. The original seven pictures still circulate on image boards everywhere.
Union Street Guest House's Yelp Backfire
How do you deal with bad PR in an age where any schmuck can leave an online review of your business that just says 1/5 STARS POOP DICK LOL? Not the way the Union Street Guest House did. The fine print on their website indicated that for every negative review posted by renters or their guests, a whopping $500 would be taken out of the renters' deposit. After the policy was discovered and publicized, Union Street Guest House found itself with 15 pages of one-star Yelp reviews, numerous editorials and articles claiming the policy was an attack on free speech, and a Facebook fan page so full of negativity, profanity, and POOP DICK LOL that it was taken down.
Tom Cruise
Scientology's tactic of relying on celebrity star power to attract new converts has one obvious flaw: all of their celebrities are crazy as hell. Witness Tom Cruise in a leaked video from 2008 claiming that only Scientologists can reform criminals, end drug addiction, and rescue people from car accidents, a performance so laughably weird that Scientology mobilized every lawyer it had to get it pulled down. The church is very good at frivolous litigation, so YouTube folded quickly, but other sites like the Gawker network held fast. Scientology pitched such a legal fit that the anarchic meme-and-hentai maelstrom known as 4chan developed Project Chanology, a subset of Anonymous dedicated to foiling Scientologist evangelicalism and legal harassment.
Neverseconds Calls Out Sh**ty Lunches
Remember how awful school lunches were? Thanks to the blog NeverSeconds, the awfulness of one Scottish schoolgirl's lunches will be remembered by the entire Internet. Launched as a writing project by nine-year-old Martha Payne and her dad, the blog tracked the price, quality, healthiness, and amount of hair (thankfully none) in each meal. NeverSeconds proved a surprising hit among those interested in school lunches, like celebrity chef and shit-talker Jamie Oliver.
The blog had hit 3 million views and raised £2000 for Malawi food relief when the local council decided that the photos were bad PR and prohibited Martha from taking pictures. A group of bureaucrats preventing an adorable little girl from reporting on food and raising money for starving children went over about as well as you'd expect, and NeverSeconds blew up overnight, raising £40,000 for Martha's charity and drowning the council in angry tweets, emails, and phone calls. NeverSeconds soon resumed reporting and ended up donating £140,000 to the Mary's Meals organization.
The Motion Picture Association of America's Major Mistake
The Advanced Access Content System is the official encryption standard used by the Motion Picture Association of America to ensure that in order to watch masterpieces like "Ouija" at home, you have to buy a disc and sit through five unskippable trailers and anti-piracy ads before actually seeing the movie. Unfortunately for the MPAA, all that's needed for clever programmers to create decoding software is a "key" of letters and numbers available on any number of tech websites. When the AACS Licensing Administrator started issuing gag orders and copyright violations, resourceful hackers started proliferating the key in any number of ways: color codes, frequencies, t-shirts, tattoos, and in one 800,000-view YouTube video, a song.
TRAFIGURA
English law concerning both libel and the freedom of the press is much different from America's, as it is based not on Enlightenment-era legal philosophy but on ancient poems about sheep. This meant oil company Trafigura could file a "super-injunction" that didn't just prevent the Guardian newspaper from reporting on a toxic waste spill that hospitalized thousands of people in the Ivory Coast, but prevented them from reporting they'd been legally prevented from reporting on it.
A helpful Labour MP sidestepped the injunction by asking about it and the waste spill in Parliament, allowing the Guardian to report that they had been barred from reporting about being barred from reporting about something having to do with the waste spill by someone who was connected to it. The British Internet soon filled in the blanks, and soon so much of the information about Trafigura was common knowledge that the super-injunction was deemed useless and the Guardian's report allowed to be published.
McDonald's is McLibel
Back when the Internet was just a bunch of universities with modems, McDonald's encountered an early version of the Streisand Effect in 1986, when it came down harder than a still-frozen McNugget on London Greenpeace for a derogatory pamphlet McD claimed was libelous. To show these limey upstarts who was boss, McDonalds spent millions of pounds and ten years in court (the longest-running case in English history) and still didn't completely win. The company was only able to show that some of the claims made by the pamphleteers were demonstrably false.
McDonald's even attempted to settle out of court with a charitable donation on the condition that defendants Helen Steel and David Morris never publicly criticize the company again, restricting their criticisms privately to friends. Steel and Morris secretly recorded the meeting and then stated they'd agree if McDonald's ceased advertising and only recommended their food to friends. Mickey D's ended up not even collecting the amount awarded to them at the end of the case, hoping the bad PR would just go away on its own. Today, the McLibel story is a feature-length documentary
Glenn Beck's Potentially Shady Past
Love him or hate him, there's one thing you can say about Glenn Beck: he has never denied raping and murdering a young girl in 1990. Posing the question as to what (possibly rapine and murderous) activities Glenn Beck was up to in 1990 was an Internet way of mocking Beck's rhetoric, and eventually the phrase became the website GlennBeckRapedAndMurderedAYoungGirlIn1990.com (now defunct). Beck's lawyers hit the site threatening a defamation lawsuit.
When the site stood its ground, they contacted the World Intellectual Property Organization to make the bizarre claim that Glenn Beck's name was copyrighted. All of this just caused more and more people to wonder aloud whether Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990, since now he seemed to be using the law to prevent people from investigating the issue. For a brief time, the first terms Google suggested after "Glenn Beck" were "rape" and "murder," but it seems like it's died down by now, leaving the question still unanswered.
The Interview's Overdramatic Debut
Let's be real: was anyone even the slightest bit interested in this movie before Dear Leader allegedly decided we shouldn't be allowed to see it? Before the massive Sony hack, "The Interview" was all set to become yet another in a long series of Sony-produced flops, and what little publicity Sony had bothered to issue for it was soon overshadowed by those curious about a movie that apparently prompted an international cybersecurity showdown.
Then, when Sony cancelled the national release, everyone blew up: not being able to see Seth Rogen and James Franco dick around for ninety minutes was an assault on American freedom! Dozens of sites pledged to stream the film with or without Sony's permission, and Sony finally relented to officially streaming the film on Netflix and releasing in arthouse theaters Christmas Day. Ironically, many security experts now believe the hack wasn't by North Koreans at all, but by disgruntled IT staff at Sony, or possibly a desperate James Franco hoping against hope to find a way to stop appearing in completely crap movies.