Maybe the Streisand effect is imaginary. Ie you don't know how many stories are successfully suppressed. Just bc barbara streisand bungled concealing something, doesn't mean something as sophisticated as fb, decades later, is as inept. Of course I'd like to think the Streisand effect is real, but I don't think we have any data.

The Streisand effect does not apply if Streisand controls a town square.

The Streisand effect only happens if you find out about the censorship. There's a million ways to reduce the reach of a story covertly.

As one example of how to slow a story: back when Wikileaks was first really trending, Facebook would sometimes just take a really long time to submit a post, or simply error out, if you tried to post a URL from Wikileaks.

> posting a link to the HN discussion

Well... contentious stories get removed from here, too. This is a topic that gets contentious.

Such as?

I assume you don't mean flagging, since those are not removed, just frozen.

There are occasions when submissions are entirely removed and don't even retain the title or URL. I know this because I use hckrnews.com as my HN front page

Yes, I do too. But can you give an example of something that was removed which wasn't garbage?

Oh yeah. Every time someone posts an article covering that GPT HN fiasco it gets flagged and removed almost immediately.

The what?

I had to look it up too, I had forgotten about it as it was not very interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24164470

Note that the link is to an article on HN, not flagged, and the comments pretty clearly debunk the article's claims. TLDR, author wrote some clickbait headlines and used gpt3 to fill in the articles, with an unspecified amount of editing, then some of them got onto the front page of HN and he wrote an article about that.

Many stories get flagged on HN as well and I assume for different reasons. Here is one flagged from an hour ago:

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/journalists-learning-they-s...

I assumed it was worthy of discussion given the whole censorship debate and concepts of censorship like AI moderation or misinformation or disinformation.

what's that one about?

This one is flagged, for example.

> Is it possible that Facebook is a big enough share of the internet that they can block the Streisand Effect? My money is on "no".

The co-ordinated efforts of a small number of corporate actors probably is. We live in a gov-valley-sov-corp media ecology with fairly sophisticated mechanisms of message control. Maybe the old netheads were wrong about streisand effect - maybe that was a temporary material condition.