The Streisand Effect: A Cautionary Tale on the Perils of Suppressing Information
The Streisand Effect: A Cautionary Tale on the Perils of Suppressing Information
Bonus: simple tricks for controlling information after an accidental release into the wild
Once upon a time, there was an organization named Company McCorporateface, Inc. This cautionary tale is about an honest mistake committed by a lowly Company intern, a backfiring solution from a Company division president, and best practices for preventing the same thing from happening in your organization.
Hard Lessons in Reverse Psychology 101
Company McCorporateface, Inc. has an analytical division that publishes reports for clients. Some reports are published online, free of charge, but the division’s revenue-generating reports are emailed to clients. This delivery method is economical and expedient, providing clients with timely intelligence so they can gain or maintain a competitive advantage. It also allows the Company to track engagement metrics, such as email open rates.
Our story begins when a Company intern sent a confidential report to a large mailing list. It wasn’t entirely the intern’s fault; someone else had mislabeled a work-in-progress for one client (still containing comments and strikethrough text) as the final draft for a large mailing list. The intern simply followed directions, and his supervisor didn’t open the attachments to double-check.
The first confused response came within five minutes, and the team quickly realized the magnitude of their blunder. Not only did the report contain sensitive information collected at a client’s request, it was distasteful. The grammar hadn’t been polished by the copy-editor and the visuals hadn’t been beautified by the graphic designer. One of the subject matter experts left belittling comments on another author’s work.
The fiasco was quickly elevated up the hierarchy, all the way to the division president. The president decided that the best resolution was to own up to the mistake by sending a follow-up email to all mailing list recipients:
Earlier today, you received an email containing a draft report intended for a different recipient. Our team sent the report in error. Please do not open the attachment and delete the email. We take our clients’ privacy seriously, and ask that you extend the same courtesy to your fellows.
Company McCorporateface, Inc. strives to uphold the highest standards in our service to esteemed clients, and this was a momentary lapse in our quality control. We will make sure this mistake is not repeated.
This was a fine example of Public Relationese that followed the principles of “admitting mistakes” and “appealing to nobler motives” from How to Win Friends and Influence People. However, but it did not convince recipients to delete the erroneous email. Instead, the Company’s email analytics showed a dramatic spike in the email open rate after the division president sent out his message. The email open rate exceeded 100%, indicating that recipients were not only reading the email, but forwarding it onward to their colleagues.
Horns of the Dilemma
What would you have done in this situation? Ignoring the problem would’ve appeared negligent and enabled the growth of rumors and misinformation. On the other hand, addressing the problem would’ve attracted unwanted attention to it.
The division president decided that publishing a mea culpa was the lesser evil. Perhaps he chose to follow a precedent: that of publishing corrections (for newspapers) or retractions (in scientific journals). Maybe he believes that upstanding leaders take the high road whenever possible and concluded that the path of transparency is consistent with his values. When the Fog of Uncertainty descends upon Leadership Land, it often helps to have a precedent or moral compass as a navigational aid.
Unfortunately, this division president got lost in the Fog of Uncertainty and traveled into the Desert of Good Intentions. Two unintended consequences burst out of the sands to bite him in the butt:
By attempting to suppress information, he implied there was a secret.
A suppression attempt from a high-level employee (like a division president) implied that the secret information was valuable enough to warrant his intervention.
The Streisand Effect
The division president had inadvertently created a form of the Streisand Effect, where an attempt to suppress information leads to more people becoming aware of the information. The term comes from 2003, when the eponymous celebrity tried to suppress an aerial photo of her seaside mansion. Before the attempt, only six people had downloaded the photo (two of them were Streisand’s lawyers). After the news broke, nearly half a million people downloaded the photo within a month.
Question: what’s the connection between:
The division president, who drew unwanted attention because his actions hinted that there were secrets worth hiding in the confidential report, versus
Barbara Streisand, who drew unwanted attention by having her lawyers send cease-and-desist letters over a picture of a house?
Answer: scarcity.
We are suckers for scarcity. Have you felt the urgency to buy during a flash sale? Ever feel pressured when a website tells you that 36 other people are viewing the same listing as you, that only 2 items are left in stock, or there are only 4 seats are left on the plane? People go to extraordinary lengths to compete for a rare collectible, admission into a selective school, the heart of high-status mate, or access to secret information.
Scarcity can even make you desire something you don’t need and normally wouldn’t want. In Dr. Robert Cialdini’s book on persuasion, scarcity is one of the six "weapons of influence." He opens his scarcity chapter with an anecdote about his desire to visit the inner sanctum of a Mormon temple solely because it was open to non-believers for a limited time.
Scarcity is such a powerful motivator that it can manufacture demand out of thin air. Barbara Streisand and the Corporate McCorporateface, Inc. division president learned their lessons the hard way.
The Moral of the Story (Bonus: Preventative Methods)
Whilst handling secrets, thou shalt not awaken latent desires by emphasizing its scarcity.
Any attempt to suppress information implies the existence of a secret. The stronger an attempt to guard information, the more valuable the secret appears to be. With that lesson in mind, what could the Corporate McCorporateface division president have done differently?
Preventative Method 1
The division president could have been more discrete. Instead of nobly proclaiming ownership of the error, he could have directed an underling (the lower-ranking, the better) to send out the “whoops” message, preferably using a generic email account. An email from a faceless stranger, lacking an authoritative job title, is much more likely to be ignored. Superficially, it looks like yet another low-value email to skim and delete, lost among the dozens that flood your inbox every day.
This seems like a pusillanimous way to deal with the problem, wholly out of character for an upstanding leader like the division president. In taking this route, he must also be candid with his staff, explaining that the alternative is far worse, and that the Company must maintain the appearance of aloofness and detachment on the outside, while furiously playing damage control on the inside.
Preventative Method 2
This email debacle was a case of “higher-ups too busy to review, lower-downs rushing to meet tight deadlines.” Most leaders would react by:
Adding another step in the review process, trading efficiency for safety
Hiring more conscientious, detail-oriented staff, while praying fervently that higher-quality staff won’t demand higher pay
Resigning themselves to re-occurrences. After all, Company McCorporateface, Inc. must make regular sacrifices at the altar of organizational efficiency.
The division president rejected all three options. Instead, he conferred with his staff and came up with a simple solution: always send out documents as links, never as email attachments. The Company was already doing this for the free reports published on its website; the same system could be adapted for paid reports (using a password/login system).
Once an email attachment is released into the wild, you can’t recapture it. But by sending out an email containing a link to the document, you maintain control. If an error is discovered later, your staff can silently replace the offending document without changing the link, as stealthy as ninjas.
This article was mostly about damage control1. However, cunning readers may have detected an opportunity to manufacture demand by creating artificial scarcity, or to entice subordinates into certain behaviors using reverse psychology.
Sound interesting? Subscribe to Adventures in Leadership Land so you don’t miss future articles about those topics!
A broad, complex topic. We focused on the Streisand Effect and scarcity to avoid distractions. In reality, many other factors were at play. For example: psychological reactance to suppression attempts, or action bias on the part of the division president.