Friday Flashback – Folks still forgetting The Streisand Effect

In my early days (If a blog that has only been around for just a smidge over 2 years can be characterized as having early days.), I wrote a post with a reference to “The Streisand Effect” and the need for lawyers and law firms who are thinking about trying to take actions to shut down unfair criticism online to give real thought to whether they are just amplifying the negative publicity.  If you are interested in reading that post, you can get there from this link.

My guess is that reminding people about the concept of The Streisand Effect will never get old.  This time though, to save people a step, I’ll simply share the quote from the Wikipedia entry itself rather than making you click a link to see what we mean when we refer to The Streisand Effect:

The Streisand effect is the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet. It is an example of psychological reactance, wherein once people are aware something is being kept from them, their motivation to access and spread the information is increased.

It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose 2003 attempt to suppress photographs of her residence in Malibu, California, inadvertently drew further public attention to it. Similar attempts have been made, for example, in cease-and-desist letters to suppress numbers, files, and websites. Instead of being suppressed, the information receives extensive publicity and media extensions such as videos and spoof songs, often being widely mirrored across the Internet or distributed on file-sharing networks.

In this story at The American Lawyer (which it seems almost entirely unnecessary to state has a significantly larger readership than this here little blog), a reader will probably learn a few things.

First, the existence of a four lawyer construction firm in Houston, Texas named The Cromeens Law Firm.

Second, the existence of a negative review of the firm on Yelp as well as some others on Google.  Which armed with that first piece of new information and the second piece of new information becomes really easy to find and read.

Third, that the four-lawyer firm is worried enough about these reviews that it is willing to spend some part of its time not focused on matters for its clients but rather in pursuing a lawsuit against unknown defendants to try to make the reviews go away.

Your mileage may vary, but my view on such matters continue to be that: (a) more people will read the reviews now than they ever would have before; (b) the lawsuit is very unlikely to succeed in making the reviews disappear; and (c) contractors and subcontractors who might be making decisions in and around Houston about whether to retain these construction lawyers probably weren’t likely to be all that influenced but unless the goal of this suit is to make stories about it end up being pretty high on the list of things that turn up in an online search about your law firm, this probably doesn’t end up being a net positive.

Now, in fairness, if the negative reviews you are trying to get to go away are at the very top of what people see if they search for you online, then a suit like this might accomplish the rare “reverse Streisand” by replacing those with higher results referencing the lawsuit at least, but when I checked today several of the first hits for this law firm’s name were good ones, so . . .