The Streisand Effect is real. Deciding when to take part in the pile-on is hard.

A couple of years ago, my boss (she’s a media ethicist) and I wrote an article looking at legal and ethical issues for journalists in Streisand Effect situations. Today, I got a note from a journalism prof friend who has a former student in a very real censorship situation, and I see the potential for it to blow up.

In short, the journalist wrote a couple of stories based on a police officer intervening in an incident involving his kid. It appears that documents were altered by the police chief to favor the officer’s kid, and the chief was charged with misconduct and obstruction.

That was about a year ago. Now, the journalist has received demands from the officer’s attorney to take down the stories on bogus grounds (saying it’s illegal to publish anything about a juvenile, which is an obvious misreading of the law cited). And the journalist’s company is inclined to take things down because they’re worried about the legal costs of fighting this, even if they’re 100 percent right and guaranteed to win. Which they are.

I brought up the Streisand Effect — potentially the best tool a journalist (or anyone else facing unlawful censorship efforts) has in dealing with this situation. If you force me to take this down, then the Internet will do its thing, shaming you for your bullying efforts by making your local dispute go worldwide. I take down the story, and literally millions of people will learn about what you did. You’ll be, as the Three Amigos would have it, bigger than famous.

This is a classic Streisand Effect situation. As I wrote about in that article a few years ago:

In 2003, entertainer Barbra Streisand was upset by aerial photos of her Malibu home that had been posted online as part of a project documenting the California coastline. Streisand sued, seeking $50 million in damages. News of her lawsuit drew enormous public attention to the photographs; they had only been viewed online six times before the lawsuit, but after Streisand sued, the photos were viewed 420,000 times. Bloggers who saw this as a censorship threat responded by reposting the photos on their blogs. Streisand’s effort to protect her privacy backfired, as the lawsuit was dismissed, but she drew continued scorn on the Internet. Streisand’s wasn’t the first instance of online censorship attempts to backfire, but it soon became the hallmark of the phenomenon. Mike Masnick, writing for the tech blog Techdirt about a resort’s attempt to twist trademark law to have its name removed from a site that posted photos of urinals in various locations, only to find that the photos were seen by more people, commented, “let’s call it the Streisand Effect.”

So, this is what the bullying censor deserves, right? He abused his power and was caught doing it, and now he’s trying to silence a journalist doing legitimate watchdog work.

I’d say, generally, yes. He’s a public official, they deserve higher scrutiny, especially when it’s about matters of abuse of power and the public interest. But this is also about a father and his kid, and drags the kid (a juvenile at the time) into a dispute that would not typically be public.

Anyhow, it’s complicated. Internet shaming can be a punishment that far outweighs the bad behavior it is responding to. I strongly encourage folks to read “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed” by Jon Ronson; here’s an excerpt about the tweets that brought the Internet down on Justine Sacco.

In the present situation, if it gets taken down and my prof friend writes about it, I’ll share that. Because I hate censorious thugs. But until it gets to that point, I hope it works out and stays local. And I’ve saved copies of the articles that may get taken down, with knowledge that the Internet Archive will probably have archived versions as well. Nothing on the Web truly ever goes away.