The Streisand Effect, slapping teachers, and critical race theory

Back in 2003, photographer Kenneth Adelman was taking photos of the California coastline from a helicopter to document coastal erosion. He had taken approximately 12,000 photos of the coast, including one that had Barbra Streisand’s home in it. She wasn’t happy about it and sued Adelman to remove the photo — and she lost.

Prior to the suit, the photo of her home had been viewed six times (including a few times by her lawyers). Since then, it’s been viewed millions of times, and her attempt to suppress it was the cause of the popularity of the photo she was trying to hide.

Techdirt helped dub this kind of situation “The Streisand Effect”, and there have been hundreds of other examples since then.

Slapping teachers

I was reminded of this when listening to a recent episode of the Reply All podcast, where they dug into the awful TikTok “Devious Lick” trend, where students would steal items from their school (generally things like soap dispensers, but it sometimes got worse).

As “Devious Lick” settled down, a new list of “upcoming TikTok challenges” started making its way around the internet, with one of the most popular coming from the Officer Gomez Facebook page: