Delete a text message and the recipient suddenly cares far more about what you retracted. This episode explores that reflex at internet scale, starting with the 2003 lawsuit in which Barbra Streisand sued a photographer over an aerial coastline photo that had been downloaded six times, two of them by her own lawyers, and turned it into an image viewed by more than 420,000 people in a month. The hosts explain how Mike Masnick coined the Streisand effect in 2005 while covering a resort's legal threat against a urinal photography site, and the psychology of reactance that drives the whole phenomenon.

The episode then moves through institutional failures: French intelligence forcing a volunteer to delete a Wikipedia page that a Swiss administrator restored with one click, book bans that raised circulation of the banned titles, the HD DVD encryp ...