In the case of the school board, there is also the Forbidden Fruit effect. (And that’s not a cute reference to the banned material). Banning any kind of work of art almost always backfires.
I tend to call it the Life of Brian Effect.
The irony is amplified, because the method used to keep something small is almost always intimidation based, usually of a legal nature, which is usually doomed to fail on first amendment grounds.
Worth noting is the music director followed correct procedure, and parents were allowed to withdraw their kids – I can’t find a good link
Interesting that the school board waited until a week before the performance when they had months.(During these months I’m guessing the students could learn all about Stonewall)
Also worth noting is the piece is an instrumental.
IMHO this is Streisand Effect adjacent.
Brian
I think a question that might be worth asking is, Is the publicity unwelcome by the school board?
Or would they be happy with the way this is playing out, publicity and all? It would be easy enough for them to slap the label “woke” or “indoctrination” on the choice of music and now say to whoever’s paying attention out in the general popuation, “See? See? This is what we have to fight against! We have to raise awareness!” It might be, but wouldn’t have to be, something any of them had thought about beforehand. Just seize the opportunity.
[Moderating]
First of all, a reminder that this is FQ. Why the school board was elected, or why they did this, are political questions, not factual.
That said, the question here was always, not “what is the Streisand Effect”, but “does this qualify”, which is less clear-cut. So I’m moving this thread to IMHO.
In anthropology nomenclature, a dichotomy exists, with one side know as “splitters,” and the other as “lumpers.”
Splitters at the extreme want to label almost every hominid fossil found as a new species, and lumpers want to fit each new find it into some existing category-- or even use it as evidence that two species are really one, thus reducing he number of species.
The lines are hard to draw. When we read book meant for lay people that say “There’s species X, species Y, and species Z,” it seems clear cut, but a lot of research, testing and arguing was involved in designating fossil A as species X.
The takeaway is that even accepting Punctuated Equilibrium, evolution is linear, so whether or not the recession of canine teeth means a different species or not is as much a matter of debate as it is of hard evidence.
I think some of the things being debated here are like changes in the fossil record, and we have lumpers and splitters-- some people see a small difference as a new phenomenon which should have its own name, and some do not.
It doesn’t mean that we are seeing different things, we’re just debating demarcations of categories.
Clearly but I think it’s a worthwhile distinction.
The Streisand Effect is when someone uses the courts to try and keep some aspect of their life secret and in the process that thing becomes far more public than if they had just left it alone.
This is when someone uses their authority to ban something they think is objectionable, and successfully do ban it. But in the process give that thing (and themselves) far more publicity than it would ever have have gotten otherwise. Like I’m betting you average Wisconsin small town conservative parent didn’t even know what Stonewall was before this all kicked off. But still the school board got their way, the song was banned and wasn’t played by the band, the publicity didn’t change that (AFAIK).
Of course you might say these two things are similar enough that it doesn’t matter. But if arguing over obscure definitions wasn’t a thing the Internet would be just porn and recipes 
[my emphasis]
Or is the Streisand Effect when a movie star uses the courts to try and keep some aspect of their life secret and in the process that thing becomes far more public than if they had just left it alone. When a famous tennis player does the same thing it should have a different name.
Obviously I’m being silly to make a point.
My point is - why is it court action that should be the defining characteristic? Why would the particular method of heavy handed suppression be the defining characteristic? To me the key reason the effect has become recognised and named is because of the irony of how - in the internet age - heavy handed suppression can be counter-productive. The punchline to the Streisand Effect story is not
“Babs used the courts”
it’s
“before Babs attempted supression the photo had been viewed four times, but after attempted suppression it was viewed millions of times”.
Maybe perverse incentive
In economics, a perverse incentive is an incentive structure with undesirable results, particularly one where those effects are unexpected and contrary to the intentions of its designers.
One example would be in certain cultures where there was a problem with rats or snakes, public officials would start offering money to people who brought in dead snakes or dead rats.
So people realized they could make money by just breeding rats and snakes at home, and bringing the dead bodies in to get paid. Eventually the public sector stopped the program, and all the still living rats and snakes were released into the wild, making the problem even worse.
You approach a problem hoping that your solution will fix the problem, but the solution actually makes the underlying problem worse.
I feel like the streisand effect would be a subset of this effect if you remove the economic aspect and just approach it from the attitude of ‘solution Y to problem X ends up making problem X much bigger and much worse’
There is also reactance which means when you try to control what media someone can watch, or what they can think, or what they are allowed to do, it just makes them want to do it more.
In psychology, reactance is an unpleasant motivational reaction to offers, persons, rules, regulations, advice, recommendations, information, and messages that are perceived to threaten or eliminate specific behavioral freedoms. Reactance occurs when an individual feels that an agent is attempting to limit their choice of response or range of alternatives.
Reactance can occur when someone is heavily pressured into accepting a certain view or attitude. Reactance can encourage an individual to adopt or strengthen a view or attitude which is indeed contrary to that which was intended — which is to say, to a response of noncompliance — and can also increase resistance to persuasion. Some individuals might employ reverse psychology in a bid to exploit reactance for their benefit, in an attempt to influence someone to choose the opposite of what is being requested. Reactance can occur when an individual senses that someone is trying to compel them to do something; often the individual will offer resistance and attempt to extricate themselves from the situation.
Sure then take the courts out of it. These are two different things that should have different names IMO…
Thing A: someone takes some actions (court case, or whatever) to keep some aspect of their life secret. By taking that action they not only fail to keep it secret they make that aspect of their life far more public and well known than would have been the case of they had done nothing at all.
Thing B: someone tries to ban some content they find objectionable from a particular forum they have authority over. They succeed in banning it, the content is removed permanently from the forum. But in doing so they make the content and their forum (and the fact this particular content is banned there) far more well known and infamous than it ever would have been if it wasn’t banned. But it’s still banned (again AFAIK)
Sure you might think differently, but IMO they are different enough to warrant different names.
So you would say that had Streisand’s court action been successful, it wouldn’t be an example of the Streisand effect?
Because that’s the only difference between A and B.
That and in case B no one is trying to keep anything secret. They arent trying to keep the Stone wall riots secret (though let’s face it they probably would if they could and that’s why they voted for Trump but thats just supposition on my part). They just didn’t want their kids playing a song about them, and they successfully banned them from doing so. As a side effect it made the Stonewall riots way more well known particularly (I’m sure) in their local community (and the fact this song about them existed, which I for one didn’t know until I read this thread). But that’s irrelevant to what they were trying to achieve.
True, but I think it’s a distinction without any important difference.
I don’t think there is any good reason to distinguish
“action to suppress a secret resulting in it becoming better known”
vs
“action to suppress taboo content resulting in it becoming better known”
because, again, I think the bolded part is the critical feature. Splitting the effect as you propose doesn’t seem to me to serve any rhetorical purpose.
Really depends on what “their kids” means - I assume you must mean “all the kids in the band/school” rather than the children of the actual school board members because there was no need to ban it otherwise. If the school board members simply didn’t want their own children to play the piece, the policy as described in this letter would have allowed those parents to opt-out. Also depends what “banning” it means - it wasn’t performed at that concert, but it was performed elsewhere by current and former band students. Considering that the composer conducted that performance, I’m guessing that this got a whole lot more attention than would have happened if board members’ kids had simply opted out. I’m also guessing the board got a lot more heat when people found out the piece has no lyrics , because how does something with no lyrics “celebrate violence”? Apparently, they decided it celebrated violence because of the dedication.
I agee with @Princhester that there no reason to distinguish between a secret and any other information being suppressed but I do think they were trying to keep the Stonewall riots secret from the high schoool students. Otherwise, why not just opt out their own kids - assuming any board members even had kids in the band.
Yes I mean all the kids they have authority over (only a minority of whom have parents that might have any problem with this, I would assume)
Because, of course, if they object to something it is only Right and Good™ that it be kept from others as well. Minding one’s own business is never an option.