The Barbara Streisand-effect

"Detailed image of Barbra Streisand's Malibu house which she attempted to suppress The Streisand effect is a phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet. It is an example of psychological reactance, wherein once people are aware that some information is being kept from them, their motivation to access and spread it is increased."

"It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose 2003 attempt to suppress photographs of her residence in Malibu, California, inadvertently drew further public attention to it. Similar attempts have been made, for example, in cease-and-desist letters to suppress files, websites, and even numbers. Instead of being suppressed, the information receives extensive publicity and media extensions such as videos and spoof songs, often being widely mirrored on the Internet or distributed on file-sharing networks."
_{Source: Wikipedia}

This effect has been seen time and time again, a good example is the header image above. Beyonce asked to have the image removed, and it became bigger than it would have ever been if it was just ignored.

The same effect can be found in children. When you tell a child not to do something, they want to do it more than ever. My son is 11 years old and doesn't swear, this is because I never made a big deal of swear words. We never swear in front of him, and try to avoid movies that have a lot of them, but when they happen we just ignore it. As he is 11 now, more and more movies and online media have swears. By ignoring them rather than making a big deal of it, he hasn't really picked up on them. I'm sure it will happen eventually but it is a good example of the reverse of the Barbara Streisand-effect. I'm sure everyone thinks their kids don't swear, at least not in front of him, but I honestly believe he is oblivious to it as we never made a big deal about it.

Anyway, the point of this post is not to teach you the Barbara Streisand-effect but to make sure you are aware of it for the real point of this post.

There was are some rumors about Disney is making a new Obi-Wan movie starring Ewan McGregor (oh ya!) and there is a subreddit r/PrequelMemes where memes of him were starting to get out of hand, so the mods banned any images of him unless there is official from Disney. Of course, this worked swimmingly well.

You can check it out yourself, but I will post a few funny ones. Many of them use blacked out images of Ewan and some use funny replacement characters or props.

_{36.4K upvotes, this is pretty significant even on Reddit, many front page posts don't even break 10K upvotes}