↓
 
Home » Libs of TikTok experiences the Streisand Effect

Libs of TikTok experiences the Streisand Effect

The New Neo Posted on by

What’s the Streisand Effect?:

The Streisand effect is a phenomenon that occurs when an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information has the unintended consequence of increasing awareness of that information, often via the Internet. It is named after American singer Barbra Streisand, whose attempt to suppress the California Coastal Records Project’s photograph of her residence in Malibu, California, taken to document California coastal erosion, inadvertently drew greater attention to the photograph in 2003…

The Streisand effect is an example of psychological reactance, wherein once people are aware that some information is being kept from them, they are significantly more motivated to access and spread that information.

And so we have Libs of TikTok’s follower increase:

The Libs of TikTok Twitter account is approaching one million followers after Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz exposed her identity in a hit piece…

Libs of TikTok has become wildly popular for simply acting as a mirror for leftist insanity. The account shares videos, tweets and other documents of anything from liberals naming their cat after Dr. Anthony Fauci to sexual content being taught to kindergartners…

The attempt from the Washington Post to silence the account now appears to have backfired spectacularly, as Libs of TikTok has gained over 300,000 followers since the Lorenz hit piece was released. It is now just 60,000 followers short of one million.

Ron Coleman, who is giving legal counsel to the account creator, has aggressively pushed back on falsehoods spread about the account creator in the aftermath of the story. After a fake tweet falsely attributed to Libs of TikTok was circulated by left-wing influencer account, Coleman threatened legal action if it was not removed. The tweet, which falsely accused the creator of defending pedophilia, was promptly deleted by all sizable accounts who had posted it.

Twitter is of course in a state of flux now that it’s been acquired by Elon Musk. Perhaps it will improve, but I’m not counting on it. I don’t use Twitter and seldom read it; I think it’s basically pernicious and have briefly explained why in this previous post.

[NOTE: See also this.]

Comments

Libs of TikTok experiences the Streisand Effect — 36 Comments

  2. Many people, common and famous, are reporting upticks in followers. DJT jr reports 87,000 new followers per day.

    Speculation is rampant that algorithms used to dampen conservative influence are being rolled back.
    “Elon, instruct them to preserve server logs”

  3. I don’t and have never used Twitter either. I have many issues with it. I feel that Twitter and the other social media platforms have collectively probably done far more harm than good for humanity so far.

    That said, I do recognise its importance in the culture war and I am willing to at least give Elon Musk the benefit of the doubt for a number of reasons. At the very least hopefully we won’t end up with another Hunter Biden laptop incident.

    But even if he’s successful in curtailing their particularly pernicious form of speech supression and he’s able to transform Twitter into a more honest, open, and transparent platform for communication, I still would have little desire to actually use it personally. I strongly dislike the terse, limited form of discussion it encourages. By the very nature of its design it tends to reward non critical thinking far too much. It promotes hot take dopemine shots and discourages careful, well thought out arguments.

  4. it’s a medium, I would say rare, so it’s a necessary evil, on the twitter top line, ‘vaccines are better than natural immunity, experts say,’ the same discredited tripe that will wash up in every paper,

  5. Opened an account and started following Libs of TikTok and other conservative accounts. Maybe others are doing the same.

  6. Fascinating about the Streisand effect. I remember that. I can’t quite remember if the real concern was with the California Coastal Commission. That might have been a David Geffen Malibu property issue or other such property. I can’t find anything on that intersection. The CCC is another one of those powerful QANGOs.

    Friends of mine did an expensive remodel and put up a fancy rustic fence around the property. They didn’t realize that their property was close enough to the shoreline that it fell within the CCC’s regulation zone. A neighbor ratted them out and they got a notice (while out of town) that they had one week to tear it down or be fined $1K per day (or was it per week?).

    I’m sure the CCC would be happy to be bought off by a Streisand unless the whole thing blows up in public.

  7. The California Coastal Commission

    The California Coastal Commission was established by voter initiative in 1972 (Proposition 20) and later made permanent by the Legislature through adoption of the California Coastal Act of 1976.

    In partnership with coastal cities and counties, The Coastal Commission plans and regulates the use of land and water in the coastal zone. Development activities, which are broadly defined by the Coastal Act to include (among others) construction of buildings, divisions of land, and activities that change the intensity of use of land or public access to coastal waters, generally require a coastal permit from either the Coastal Commission or the local government.
    – – –
    The Commission is an independent, quasi-judicial state agency. The Commission is composed of twelve voting members, appointed equally (four each) by the Governor, the Senate Rules Committee, and the Speaker of the Assembly. Six of the voting commissioners are locally elected officials and six are appointed from the public at large. Three ex officio (non-voting) members represent the Resources Agency, the California State Transportation Agency, and the State Lands Commission.

    Some accountability, but not a lot. Regulation for the little people.

  8. I hope this isn’t the end of Coleman’s legal action against the libelous tweet. He should track down its creators and sue them into poverty.

  9. Wholeheartedly agree with your opinion of twitter, Neo. In addition to any other shortcomings, the nature of twitter enables, encourages, an abundance of mindless statements from people who would be better served to keep their thoughts private.

    I don’t know that Musk will make it better; but, I don’t see how he can make it worse. If he cannot shape it to suit his purposes, maybe he will just kill it. After all, he has only sunk $40B or so.

    It will be fascinating to see how the “Musk effect” plays out generally on our culture over time. He is a force.

  10. I don’t have twitter or facebook accounts. There are already enough good internet sites – NeoNeoCon for example (stroke the blogger :-}) – for me.

    Per “The Streisand Effect” is kind of reminds me of the ‘security by obscurity’ method of protecting digital assets.

    Don’t draw attention to yourself.

    Of course THAT can create a chilling attitude toward expressing your opinion.

    Sheesh … it’s like EVERYTHING is a tradeoff.

  11. While I understand your dislike of Twitter and agree with most (all?) of the negative comments regarding Twitter that folks here have posted (I am not on it either), I think you all have left out one, crucial facet of Twitter:

    Its ability for individuals to share newsworthy events and information in real-time, from almost anywhere.

    Remember the BLM riots when CNN field reporters were assuring us the protests were “peaceful” or “mostly peaceful?” Others in the streets could capture contrary video with their phones in real time and post it to Twitter where millions saw it. The U.S. is still free enough where this facet of Twitter isn’t that impactful, but it can be a game changer in other parts of the world.

    There is nothing special about the “technology” of Twitter. It’s basically the phone texting app we all have on our phones with Twitter managing group distribution lists. It could easily be recreated. Like a lot of tech, its value is in its existing user base, built up over years*. Regarding this facet of private individuals reporting live on current events, the real value of Twitter is that so many journalists and government accounts from many countries are already on it.

    A thing like Twitter makes it much more difficult for governments and large organizations to abuse private individuals.

  12. Tuvea,

    I so wish our federal government took your approach regarding protection of government officials. The huge caravans of several ton, black, bullet-proof armored SUVs preceded and followed by lines of motorcycle cops and cop cars with rollers flashing and sirens blaring depresses me whenever I see the displays. It is so un-American.

    Our security should be clever, clandestine, constantly changing and efficient and economical. American leaders are not like Soviet Czars or Roman Emperors, carried around on litters in parades of spear holding, armored thugs.

  13. Back in the late 1970s. I had a house on a cliff near the beach in Orange County, CA. We had a major landslide and the house ended up 7 feet from the cliff edge. I had to rebuild the foundation on the ocean side. I found that I had to appear before the coastal commission for permission to repair the damage. At one point the commission was demanding an easement to allow people to walk through my property to the beach. Eventually, I was able to convince them that the easement ended in a 200 foot cliff. They gave up.

    I agree with Rufus above but I have never had enough interest in Twitter to open an account.

  14. When I was a reporter, we dreaded “scanner duty.” It involved sitting by the police scanner and waiting for a newsworthy call to come through.

    As idealistic, young journalists, we thought it beneath us to rely on public broadcasts for story ideas. Yet, when you needed something to fill a page….

    Now, it’s Twitter.

    The minute a “news” story starts quoting tweets, I stop reading. The writer can’t be bothered to look past his iPhone for sources?

  15. The only reason I’ve had to look at Twitter was to check the accounts of some conservative reporters and commentators for news links.

  17. Ages ago when Facebook was still a Harvard student plaything, I thought eventually I’d get on it. When it and other social media systems matured I found even the concept of them to be vaguely repulsive and never bothered with any of it.

    But I think Rufus at 2:11pm is correct. There is real power in these systems. I recall that there was some substantial discussion, figuratively in the back pages of our media, about the roll Google had played in fomenting the Arab Spring. I think some of the systems were instant messaging apps of that era. Were they trying to implement their own agenda, or a White House/CIA agenda or some combination?

    This Wiki section isn’t terribly informative, but gives a flavor.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring#Social_media
    Google/Alphabet is curiously absent except for Youtube as a passive element.

    Although …, the section contains this word salad which probably 90% horsesh_t, but even 10% validity would be scary.

    In the months leading up to events in Tunisia, Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, Communications Program Manager Jonathan Stevens predicted the use of “collaborative Internet utilities” to effect governmental change. In his thesis, Webeaucracy: The Collaborative Revolution, Stevens put forth that unlike writing, printing, and telecommunications, “collaborative Internet utilities” denote a sea-change in the ability of crowds to effect social change. People and collaborative Internet utilities can be described as actor-networks; the subitizing limit (and history) suggests people left to their own devices cannot fully harness the mental power of crowds. Metcalfe’s law suggests that as the number of nodes increases, the value of collaborative actor-networks increases quadratically; collaborative Internet utilities effectively increase the subitizing limit, and, at some macro scale, these interactive collaborative actor-networks can be described by the same rules that govern Parallel Distributed Processing, resulting in crowd sourcing that acts as a type of distributed collective consciousness. The Internet assumes the role of totemic religious figurehead uniting the members of society through mechanical solidarity forming a collective consciousness. Through many-to-many collaborative Internet utilities, the Webeaucracy is empowered as never before.

    My summary: It empowers mob action and mob rule. Nice.

    “Totemic religious figurehead”?? (snickers)

  18. If I recall correctly, Eric Schmidt, the then CEO of Google, made hundreds of visits to the White House in Obama’s first term. Nothing to see here. Move along.

  19. It’s not really the Streisand Effect, though, is it? The Streisand effect was essentially the public’s / mob’s response in jeering defiance of the express wishes of Streisand, which were explicitly confounded and then overwhelming reversed by the crowd, making matters worse than before she had said anything. It’s the punishment that makes the perpetrator realize they shoulda kept their Big Mouth shut.

    I’m sure TikTok is thrilled with the increased exposure, but it’s not because of something they didn’t want to happen. It’s more a comeuppance to Taylor Lorenz, the Middle-Aged Professional Teenager, for being so petulantly stupid to think she actually wielded that kind of veto authority. It’s the Anti-Streisand effect, once removed – in a way.

  20. I mostly share a dim view of twitter, as it reduces complex issues too often to misleading simplicity. That said, ideally it can be a forum for succinct, penetrating whit, which leads me to hope that the conservative actor James Woods returns to twitter. No one does succinct skewering of the righteously pompous better.

  22. Twitter is a phenomenal on-the-scene news source.

    It is how I know Capitol police moved barricades and opened the doors to the Capitol; that citizens took selfies with the LEOs, and walked inside the rope lines through the Rotunda: that three busloads of men off loaded near the Capitol and put on Trump gear and headed to the Capitol, not to the Ellipse. I saw it in near real time, from the people I follow on Twitter, as they posted and my feed showed me their videos, or their retweets of others’ videos and comments.

    I watched the capture of the Tsarnov brothers in Watertown from the windows of t houses on the street of the shoot out and the younger brother’s capture from the house adjacent to the sailboat. The neighbors were giving information ahead of the Fox reporters on the scene, and much closer.

    If it wasn’t for Twitter and YouTube and Facebook, untold numbers of people would have died from being intubated and ventilated on arrival to hospitals for treatment of their Covid. It was there we all learned from young residents mainly in NYC that “early intubation” was likely doing more harm than good; perhaps even killing people.

    It is shameful, perhaps criminal, that the same platforms’ censorship of early treatment success with repurposed drugs is at least a partial cause of 50% (or maybe as many as 70%) of the deaths from Covid which failed to be prevented by proper care.
    Had people had known it could be treated, they would have demanded treatment.
    Had enough people known, even the guys signing the doctors’ paychecks would have had to cave.

    Alex Berenson tried. Robert Malone tried. Naomi Wolf tried. All were banned. For “misinformation” that was actually factual.

    That is what I think has caused the gnashing of teeth–their fear the massive collusion re: Covid policies–masking, lockdowns–and vaccines is going to be revealed. Not to mention banning the laptop coverage, which made the November 2020 election as invalid as any in the third world.

    James Woods is again on my feed, as are scores of people who clearly have been shadow banned. These past two days have been full of people I haven’t seen in a long, long time. They’ve been posting–they just weren’t showing up.

    These Twitter people are afraid.
    And I suspect destroying more algorithms as I type.

  23. Lee,
    So James Woods is on your feed again, precisely because someone in a Twitter back office quietly changed an algorithm, today or yesterday?? Wow.

    Yes, you know the document and “fingerprint” evidence is being destroyed.

    Sen. Josh Hawley has tweeted about documenting the shadow banning and other stuff, and then exposing it. I think it will get destroyed first, unless brilliant Elon has some secret method of hacking it all before that happens. Which would probably be illegal.

  24. I have never had a Twitter account, but over the last couple of years I have read tons of Tweets. You do not have to have an account to passively read much of the site.
    I saw a lot of BLM / Antifa violence on Facebook and Twitter. In spite of leftist censoring, more news got thru on those sites than it did in the Main Stream media.
    Neo post well thought out articles. Some of the best thought out articles on the net, in my opinion. When I still had a Facebook account, I would often do a copy / paste of the internet address of some of her specific articles to my FaceBook wall, where interested parties could follow the link back to this site.
    That being said, Musk is right in calling Twitter a kind of forum. Bloggers like Neo are out in the suburbs. Twitter is downtown, central station.
    If the Musk deal goes completely thru, I plan to get a Twitter account.
    If NEO set up a parallel account up there, with excerpts with links back to this site , she would get more traffic. I am sure there are drawbacks to that as well. She might not want that much traffic! She might have to do like Ace seems to have done and seems to have other people helping him run his site.

  25. Lee on April 27, 2022 at 8:28 pm said: “It is how I know Capitol police moved barricades…”
    Is this movement of barricades done by uniformed CP’s and it is different from the fence removals and barricade removals shown in the two Revolver videos?? (possibly by Ray Epps’s accomplices? or Antifa or FBI informants or ???)

  26. I just hope that the proprietor of Libs of TikTok is able to make a living at the Babylon Bee or somewhere else until natural retirement age. She is not likley to hold another job in any national or international corporation again ever unless conditions change.

  28. Bauxite:

    IIRC she is a realtor in Brooklyn. People in Florida or Texas might find her to be an exemplary business asset.

  30. I got off Twitter and Facebook, as well, because I was viciously attacked, and also because they knew too much about me. Anything you think is free is not: They are collecting and selling what they know about you.

  31. I agree with Lee that Twitter is a great way to learn of breaking news. I am following Trent Telenko and The Study of War, among others, to keep up with events in Ukraine. If one is dilegent, which one should be with important things, it is not hard to filter out the propaganda. I much prefer to be proactive rather than have anyone curate the news for me. As for Facebook, it seems to work well in keeping up with people you care about. I haven’t had any bad experiences, but then I’m not on it much.

    Somewhat related: A number of sites I visit promote supporting “conservative news”. I would much prefer to support “Howard Cosell news”, i.e., tell it like it is. (Yes, I know, Howard was a showman, but it’s the principle that counts, right?)

  32. om – That’s fortunate. Real estate is probably local enough that she can go back to it later if she wants, at least outside of very blue areas.

  33. Yes, if she does real estate in the Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn she’s unlikely to have a problem with that. It’s the rest of the world that is out to get her.

  34. I don’t use twitter because about the only actual discussion that can take place in 300 words or less is also referred to best as “mindless blathering”.

    “Twits” are much more accurate a description than “Tweets”.

    P.S., I found it remarkably hilarious that one of the moronic anti-Musk diatribes called attention to an off-the-wall tweet in which Musk jokingly expressed he was thinking of removing the “w” in the name.

    The ignorant tool then assumed that “Titter” was some kind of juvenile breast reference, being totally bereft of a classical college-grade vocabulary.

    “I’m a moron studying to be an idiot, and failing! But my observations about the world around me still matter somehow, and should be taken seriously!!”

    SMH.

  35. Yeah, it was the NY Post piece, cited earlier in Neo’s posts (perhaps by a commenter)

    https://nypost.com/2022/04/25/these-are-elon-musks-possible-plans-for-twitter-after-44-billion-deal/

    Musk has also mused about more outlandish changes including converting Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters into a homeless shelter — an idea endorsed by Jeff Bezos — and dropping the word “w” from Twitter’s name.

    “I’m serious about this one,” the billionaire said earlier in April about changing Twitter’s name to an apparent reference to breasts.

    Clueless, ignorant putz with all the vocabulary depth of a 10yo.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

↑