Dan Snyder Helps Us Demonstrate The Streisand Effect In Numbers
from the nice-work-dan dept
Having coined the term "The Streisand Effect" a while back, I'm always interested in more examples of it in action. We recently talked about how Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder sued the Washington City Paper over a tongue-in-cheek article criticizing him, and the response may actually give us some Streisand Effect data. Paul Alan Levy sends over a neat blog post from Tech Cocktail that tries to quantify how much more attention was driven to the article Snyder was so upset about. The answer? An awful lot.The article garnered 554 tweets and over 7,000 Facebook (FB) likes. A quick survey of City Paper articles shows that few, if any, other articles by Mr. McKenna rate more than 5 comments, tweets or FB likes.So by suing, Snyder helped drive a ton more traffic to the article that was critical of him. And if you think that within all that traffic some folks are agreeing with Snyder's take on things... again that doesn't appear to be the case:
Activity on the Paper’s Facebook Group has increased and is overwhelmingly supportive, as is the Twittosphere. Sentiment towards Snyder is unanimously negative as measured by tools like Tweet Feel which at my last count showed a 100% anti-Snyder rating, well below Hosni Mubarak who came in at 67% negative.Yeah. Perhaps next time, before suing over some minor criticism, people might take such results into account.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: dan snyder, data, streisand effect
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Some congressmen from one of the opposition parties displayed during the session a big banner that read "You wouldn't let a drunk drive your car. Why do you let one run your country?". A journalist called Carmen Aristegui, while reporting this incident in her radio program, asked the Presidency to give a statement on the truth of such accusation. She was fired!
What's Streisandish here is that the firing brought the alcoholism gossip to a whole new level, even turning #Aristegui into a worldwide trending topic for a day, and a Mexican trending topic for two and a half. I guess censorship never fails to backfire.
PS. The government denies having a hand in this issue, but at the very least, there is a certain chilling effect on free speech even if it's a free decision by a privately owned broadcasting company.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
For example, I just tried "mubarak" on Tweet Feel. Apparently a lot of people are currently retweeting someone's gaffe that he is "the best thing to happen to comedians since George Bush", which would seem to be negative or at best neutral - and yet because of the word "best" they are all being counted as positive.
I suspect that sentiment is still pretty anti-Snyder, but I'm not sure the Tweet Feel numbers mean a whole lot.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Maybe they're all saying "Boo-urns."
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Here's what's really strange. The word is out that Tony Wylie was the man behind the lawsuit. He himself admitted it to Brian Mitchell and Snyder threw him under the bus during other interviews.
You mean to tell me that one of the most lauded PR men in sports, didn't know that this would be the result?!?!? Are you kidding me?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
Consider all the ways in which a tweet can be misinterpreted by a computer...
"Sometimes Dark Helmet makes me laugh so hard it's painful"
"TAM sure is great at obfuscation and logical fallacies."
"LOL!!!! i would KILL to marry JUSTIN BIEBER!"
...et cetera
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
I keep waiting for...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: I keep waiting for...
Wouldn't paradox be more appropriate than wormhole?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: I keep waiting for...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Page hits?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Lies, Damned Lies, And Statistics
Why don’t you give any space to the opposing view? You need another chart showing how the article has shrunk in and collapsed on itself in shame since dear, respected Mr Snyder pointed out how hurtful it was. Then your coverage would be more Fair and Balanced.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Lies, Damned Lies, And Statistics
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
If you think that you're an idiot. No one likes Snyder. He's the guy who sued fans who were too poor to pay for their tickets.
Yeah, that's the way to build up fan base. Sue your biggest fans when they're down.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
So he's sort of like Steve Jobs?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
got me to look
How did this man get enough money to buy the team, again?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: got me to look
[ link to this | view in chronology ]