The Streisand effect
Streisand effect, named after the American singer Barbra Streisand, is quite simply a social phenomenon in which efforts to hide a juicy piece of information backfires on the person trying to suppress it.
It’s basic common sense: if you’ve made a mistake, don’t make a fuss about it. This, almost, always backfires.
In October 2020, NY Post posted a series of emails – allegedly from Joe Biden’s son, ‘Hunter Biden’s’ laptop – indicating a corruption scheme that Hunter was privy to. Twitter, being the poster child for left in US, quickly removed all such articles while blocking NY Post’s own twitter account. Researchers at MIT cited an increase of over 5000 shares per 15 minutes after the twitter ban.
In finance, companies often fall into this trap by deliberately trying to hide/fudge a parameter that they failed to perform on. Luckin’ Coffee (once touted as the next Starbucks) in China made a big mess of themselves when they created dummy customers to hide their mistake of unusually high per customer spends.
SE just asks you to keep quiet and improve. Do you see something similar happening in India? And why aren’t we talking about this?
That’s it. Thanks.
