This graph shows the spike which happened for the footballer at the centre of the Twitter legal battle which happened at Friday 3pm.

The plot can be done easily from Trendistic.

The Streisand effect is a primarily online phenomenon in which an attempt to hide or remove an item of information has the unintended consequence of publicising the information more widely. The effect is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose attempt in 2003 to suppress photographs of her residence inadvertently generated further publicity. Similar attempts have been made, for example, in cases of attempted suppression of files and websites. Instead of being suppressed, the information receives extensive publicity, often being widely mirrored across the Internet or distributed on file-sharing networks.

Mike Masnick of Techdirt introduced the term after the singer and actress, citing privacy violations, unsuccessfully sued photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com for US $50 million in an attempt to have an aerial photograph of her mansion removed from the publicly available collection of 12,000 California coastline photographs. Adelman said that he was photographing beachfront property to document coastal erosion. As a result of the case, public knowledge of the picture increased substantially; more than 420,000 people visited the site over the following month.

This issue has frustrated many organisations: when MI6 wanted to remove a list of its agents from the site cryptome.org, it was frustrated by the site’s American owner. The Church of Scientology has been similarly frustrated in its efforts to keep secret its “briefings”. When the British-based Internet Watch Foundation tried to ban the digitised cover of the German rock band Scorpions’ Virgin Killer album from the net, its attempts led to wider circulation of the image than would ever have happened otherwise.