Twitter, Facebook’s attempt to squelch a baseless Biden story backfired
Periodically, it seems that everyone in the public eye, even tech giants, has to rediscover the phenomenon known as the Streisand Effect — the hard way, as Twitter and Facebook are now doing.
The Streisand Effect is named after showbiz legend Barbra Streisand, who noticed, in 2003, that photographer Kenneth Adelman had posted a picture of her Malibu home. Possibly you had never heard of Mr. Adelman or his many coastal photographs; most people hadn’t. Even fewer knew he’d photographed Ms. Streisand’s home. But they certainly knew after Ms. Streisand sued Mr. Adelman. Before the lawsuit, the images had only been downloaded six times, two of those by her own lawyers. Afterward, the image got hundreds of thousands of visits a month.
On Wednesday, Facebook and Twitter offered a live demonstration of how this effect works. The New York Post published a story based on a trove of leaked emails allegedly found on a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, son of Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee. The provenance of the emails seems questionable ( Russia, murmurs someone to my left), and even if they’re real, it’s unclear that they tell us anything we didn’t already strongly suspect, namely that like the children of many political figures, Hunter Biden seems to have made every effort to cash in on his last name.
What’s missing is evidence that his father participated in this, other than perhaps unwittingly, so the story probably wouldn’t have gone anywhere much. But Facebook restricted sharing of the story, and Twitter decided to ban any links to it, then to suspend the accounts of users who had tweeted them — including Jake Sherman of Politico.
“Censorship!” cries the right, even as the left hollers “Twitter’s not the government!” But given that Facebook and Twitter actually helped expand the work’s audience — however unintentionally — this isn’t really a great example of censorship, private or public.
What it does represent is something the right has becoming keenly alive to: the left’s exercise of power over cultural spaces where rightwingers are being driven toward extinction. That power isn’t new, of course, but for a long time, its practical effect was mostly a matter of focus, or at worst, as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt puts it, asking “Can I believe it?” about narratives that flattered left- wing views, and “Must I believe it?” about those that favored the right.
More recently, however, in many venues the quiet hegemony of covert decisions has been turning into an explicit regime, confidently exercising its prerogatives. There are a lot of theories about why, and probably there are a lot of actual reasons, too, but clearly, it is happening in spaces that used to brand themselves as neutral. Sure, Twitter insists that the Biden story violated prior policy about publishing potentially hacked materials, lest the platform encourage further malfeasance — but would Twitter apply that standard to the recent New York Times investigation of Mr. Trump’s tax returns, considering that whoever leaked them to the Times quite possibly committed a federal crime?
Undoubtedly, one factor contributing to this shift is that people who work in all sorts of media companies — social on the West Coast, old - school on the East — believe that they helped to propel Mr. Trump into the Oval Office. There’s enormous pressure, internal and external, not to repeat that mistake. For example, by amplifying stolen emails that could reignite a back- burnered Democratic scandal right before a presidential election.
I myself am alternately enraged and grieved by our president; I aspire to expedite his exit from the national stage by every legal means. But I do wonder whether the sort of thing we saw on Wednesday actually accelerates the arrival of that happy day — or whether the left, like Ms. Streisand, might be contributing to the very outcome they most want to avoid.
Mr. Trump has generated unprecedented resistance by openly flouting norms that traditional politicians at worst used to dodge quietly.
The members of that resistance have understandably come to believe that more aggressive curbs on conservative “fake news” are a necessary counterweight to the disproportionate political power currently enjoyed by the right, and the thuggish way Mr. Trump wields it.
But such actions can only call attention to how lopsided and largely unaccountable the left’s own power is in the cultural sphere. There’s a reason that President Donald Trump likes to spotlight that imbalance too — and market himself as the necessary corrective. So if you want to hasten him out of office, a preemptive self-balancing, rather than a more muscular tilt, might be the counterweight America actually needs.