The Streisand Squeeze: naming a new exploit.

Many of you have heard of “The Streisand Effect” but may not know it has evolved into a tactic. Certainly I didn’t grasp this until recently, and I couldn’t find a description or name for it. Hence this thread. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect?wprov=sfti1

Here is the basic idea. You have something like a podcast, community or product you want to promote. Only maybe it’s tough to find an audience. So the exploit is that you are going use people who have built audiences to drive their traffic to you relying on digital harassment.

For example, let’s imagine Sally Gupta has built a brand and following and you want a chunk of it for your dental products website http://www.NewToothpaste.beauty 

So you start harassing her (and other people w/ audiences) getting followers focused on her teeth. It’s free speech, right?

Maybe Sally has a chipped tooth. Or maybe she has her own dental care line and you raise generic questions you know aren’t adding much of anything.

“What unsafe ingredients might Sally be hiding from customers of her toothpaste empire?”

If she doesn’t respond? Sally’s hiding!

The goal is to get Sally Gupta to react to drive traffic. So you try to needle Sally. But perhaps Sally has been coached not to react to avoid triggering the Streisand Effect. So what do you do?

Here is where the squeeze comes in. You feed others in Sally’s orbit or ecosystem.

Once you map out who Sally knows you target people who are unsuspecting. Maybe you pose as a friend of Sally. Or maybe you look for someone in a conflict with her. Or you feed something pre-chewed to a blog or news cite.

If you succeed, you have locked Sally in a drama with you.

But Sally may not even know who you are. She didn’t consent to be your friend. She didn’t do business w/ you. You forced her to contend w/ you despite no meaningful earlier connection. And now she has to swat you away by responding...which is your big win. She mentions the drama.

Boom, now you are on her level. You have succeeded in getting into a dispute with someone with an audience even if Sally says “This NewToothpaste company is relentlessly harassing me!” Ha! She mentioned you!!

That’s the Streisand Squeeze. Dramas one can’t respond to *or* ignore.

Many of you have wanted to know why I’ve yet to restart the podcast. Well, right now I am targeted in more than one Streisand Squeeze plays. And, to be honest, I don’t know what to do. I get the advice you can’t respond. And I get the advice you can’t ignore. But I can’t do both.

So one thing I may try to explain in a bit is that when I don’t respond to something, you may not be seeing the same iceberg I am. You may be seeing the tip.

In particular, the main tactic is to create fear & doubt: “This podcast/person is running dangerous irresponsible cult.”

Many of you are away that @uberfeminist, @piney_the, @Sciencing_Bi were all trying to protect you from abusive scientists.

Only one problem: They were all fake harassing accounts pretending to promote health in the sciences or to tell you the truth. I was targeted w drama by 2.

Well, now I am being targeted by different groups. In one case a modest collection of PhDs (I kid you not) who enjoy talking and laughing about doxing me, targeting my home, my family and about violently raping. I have been sent a large amount of evidence that is chilling.

I’d like to avoid posting what I have. But groups attempt to force me to mention them & respond to them by harassment to drive traffic to their sites. I don’t know a soul who knows how to handle an “Academe meets 4chan” community alternating between science & Rape/Doxx threats.

So, here’s where we are. I’d like to podcast more. Rest assured we have a considerable amount of material scraped from the harassers’ sites. We also now have real names in most, but not yet all, cases. But we would like to avoid getting into moronic drama.

Not sure what to do.

If you have been through this with your following, I would value talking through legal, security, and social media strategies. If this is happening to me with different groups, I am guessing others have it worse with their followings. But The Streisand Squeeze is no joke.

I just hope you never encounter it. It sickens me and sours me because there isn’t a great solution to a double bind.

I want to get back to bringing you things I’m excited about that are hopeful, new and may be a portal out of our current world of social media!

Thx for reading.

Lastly if you see me not responding to something, consider the above. Use your noodle and it will make sense.

I’ll say more when and if I have this figured out a bit better. But we are really counseled to say *nothing* by the top people in security. Sucks man! But so it is.

P.S. if someone asks you why we aren’t releasing episodes or responding to some issues, send them here. This is one of the main reasons post election. We would like to be back up at full throttle and hope to be so soon.

[Not sure how many will see this these days on Twitter.]