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What is the Streisand Effect, and how might it backfire on Trump if he sues the BBC?

The Streisand Effect comes from an incident that involved, shocker, Barbara Streisand, aka Babs.

In 2003, a photographer, photographing Malibu from the waterfront, took a picture that included Barbara Streisand’s palatial estate. She demanded the image be taken down, and, when she didn’t get her way, sued the photographer and the website hosting the picture for 50 MILLION dollars. She eventually lost, had to pay something like 180,000 in legal fees for the people she sued, and the picture stayed up

Thing is, her lawsuit put an absurd amount of attention on the picture. And where she lived. And everything to do with her residence in Malibu.

She had filed the suit claiming she was concerned with her privacy. But, in filling the absurd lawsuit, she had basically put a tremendous amount of attention on the very thing she claimed she wanted kept private.

Whoops.

That’s the Streisand Effect – an attempt to hide some information instead resulting in the greater, more widespread knowledge of that information.

Trump is threatening to sue the BBC because they took his speech and purposefully cut it in order to make it look bad.

He’s hoping to do precisely the opposite of what Streisand did – drawing MORE attention to his ACTUAL speech, because the way that it (like many of his speeches) has been cut up by the press was designed to dishonestly represent what he said. Indeed, many of the claims that have been made about Trump saying this or that absurd thing fall apart under actually scrutiny.

Trump is an expert on the Streisand Effect. He experiences it every time he launches a lawsuit against, anybody, that requires that he be present for the discovery phase of a trial. That is usually when he either withdraws the suit, or reaches a settlement out of court.

In 2022 he sued the Pulitzer organization for defamation. Claiming they had rewarded journalists for spreading lies about his russian connections. Well, just this week the courts have ordered he release ALL of his financial and ALL of his medical records, including any and all prescriptions he is on, or has taken since 2017, including mental health exams.

I can see another lapsed trump lawsuit in the near future.

Streisand , by trying to block the public from seeing her residence/address, just heightened the scrutiny.

So. I am sure the BBC has the wherewithal to continue the case, further into the discovery phase than the TACO president is willing to go.

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