Government Internet Censorship Isn’t Just Ineffective: Here’s Proof It Backfires Horribly

Singer Barbra Streisand and the governments of Turkey and Pakistan have little in common. But there is one thing: All have tried to censor the Internet, and all have failed miserably.

In a new paper, Zubair Nabi, with IBM Research’s big data and analytics research group in Ireland, details how the so-called “Streisand effect” plays out over and over again when authoritarian governments try to censor information online, either by blocking or partially blocking “offensive” websites, throttling access speeds, or out-and-out manipulating content.
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