Using Causal Impact to quantify the Streisand Effect
Here’s the story of how Australia’s richest person was caught in the Streisand effect and why sometimes keeping quiet is the best thing you can do
Imagine this: a piece of art hangs in a prestigious gallery. It features influential politicians, athletes, cultural figures and other icons.
One person takes fierce objection to their portrayal and quietly demands the artwork be removed. Instead of it being silently resolved in the shadows, this demand stirs up a storm and now the whole world is interested and wants to see the painting. The very act of trying to suppress the painting resulted in it being in the spotlight!
This is what happened recently in Australia, perfectly illustrating the infamous Streisand Effect. I recently came across this effect while listening to the Morning Brew daily show.
For those of us unfamiliar, the Streisand Effect occurs when an attempt to suppress information inadvertently brings it to greater public attention. The name itself comes from a 2003 incident involving singer Barbra Streisand, who sued to remove aerial photographs of her California mansion from the internet. The lawsuit, ironically, drew far more attention to the photos than they ever would have received otherwise.
Now, back to Australia. The artwork in question is titled “Australia in Colour” and features portraits of 21 prominent figures, including mining magnate Gina Rinehart. These portraits were created by Vincent Namatjira. Rinehart, Australia’s richest person, objected to her portrayal and demanded the National Gallery remove it. This attempt at censorship, however, had the opposite effect. News outlets everywhere picked up the story, and suddenly, everyone was talking about “Australia in Colour” — and Rinehart’s inclusion in it
If you see the other portraits part of the artwork, you’ll notice that every portrait looks a certain way. It doesn’t appear that the artist took special efforts to make Rinehart look different. That’s just his style!
But the demand to pull this painting down did cause quite an uproar online and offline and I wanted to dig in to see if I could put some numbers around this news.
In an effort to quantify this effect, I pulled Gina Rinehart’s mentions on Google trends over the past year.
As you can see there isn’t a lot of online interest over the past year, it’s truly crickets, and then suddenly there’s a huge spike around May 14.
This spike corresponds to when this news was picked up by the BBC, Financial Review, Guardian, New York Post and many more publications. Even Stephen Colbert got in on the action with his hilarious take.
We can clearly see the spike in online mentions after May 14th but how much was it? Is there a number we can assign to this increase in impressions? Can we quantify this effect?
Well to dig more I ran Causal Impact on this data to find the effect of the articles and I got the following results:
We see that the news articles had a 1351% increase in online impressions! That is an astronomical number! Not a lot of people knew about Gina before this and suddenly the whole world is interested!
Now you could argue that all this is just theoretical and sure more people were suddenly interested in the paintings and if you see impressions online there was this huge increase, but did it really have an impact in the real world?
The answer is yes! As reported by the Guardian, the museum saw visitors increase by 24%!
So yes, not only was the online interest significant it also translated into real visitors flocking the museum to see this piece of art.
So the next time you’re tempted to silence something, remember the Streisand effect. Sometimes, the best way out of a situation is to stay quiet.
Gina Rinehart: Mining magnate demands to have portraits removed
Gina Rinehart's campaign to have two portraits removed has sparked debate about art and censorship.www.bbc.com
Gina Rinehart lobbies NGA to remove Indigenous portrait
The country's richest resident has made her displeasure privately known about a portrait at the national institution.www.afr.com
