Two many years after it permeated public consciousness, the “Streisand effect” is alive and properly and battering the reputations of would-be tyrants across Europe.  

You’ve seen this social-media phenomenon in motion whenever a highly effective individual’s try to suppress on-line info backfires spectacularly.

It grew to become an early Internet meme after Barbra Streisand sued to scrub a picture of her Malibu property from the Internet in 2003 — and turned a little-noticed pic that had been seen all of six instances into a joke that 500,000 individuals downloaded.  

Apparently some politicians across the pond have been residing in a bubble.

Take Britain’s Simon Bennett, a native pol with a seat on the metropolis council of Wolverhampton, a small metropolis close to Birmingham.

When a 15-year-old boy named Fraser used Facebook to put up an AI-altered picture of Bennett as a bunny rabbit, with a pointed caption jabbing him for “nibbling” at his Conservative celebration’s “last remaining shreds of . . . credibility,” the councillor didn’t snort it off — he called the police. 

The West Midlands Police, extremely, didn’t just go to Fraser: They arrested him, seized his units and took him in for questioning.

But if you don’t need individuals sharing a image of you as a bunny rabbit, you most likely shouldn’t call consideration to it. 

Because as Barbra Streisand could have advised Bennett, that will backfire.

Before the police motion, Fraser’s unique Facebook put up was only seen by a comparatively small viewers — now the image of bunny-rabbit Bennett has been seen by thousands and thousands.

UK police arrested Fraser for the picture.

The picture has been broadly reproduced in information protection (The New York Post, The Telegraph and others) and has gone viral on social media.

One put up on Polymarket’s X account has more than 6.8 million views. 

Free-speech advocates like David Atherton reposted the pic in solidarity, including, “Come and get me West Midlands Police.”

And meme-ified variations of Fraser’s manipulated picture now abound.

None of this is a shock — indeed, any competent lawyer or media skilled should have suggested Bennett to lay off the child. 

And the harm to Bennett’s status could be everlasting.

A Google search for “simon bennett councillor” produces countless pages about the affair. 

Not only will Bennett’s constituents and future voters see Fraser’s joke image, they’ll be taught that Bennett is the form of man who sends a squad of cops after a child for a Facebook put up.

The Streisand incident was virtually 25 years in the past.  Even a politician should have figured issues out by now.

But in the UK as properly as in Europe, the urge to censor irritating on-line speech maintains a highly effective pull.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has reportedly filed a whole lot of police reports against on-line critics for calling him “Pinocchio” and other petty insults.

The German police apparently took his reports critically — but then, they also launched a prison investigation against a citizen for calling another politician, Ricarda Lang, fats. 

This, of course, ensured that search engines like google and yahoo will pair the phrases “Ricarda Lang” and “fat” for years to come.

Andy Grote, another German politician, despatched police after a Twitter person who called him a pimmel — avenue slang for penis. 

The fees were dropped after public outcry, but the incident undoubtedly led a lot more Germans to think of Grote as a pimmel for making such a fuss about it.

The lesson for public figures should be apparent: Thicker skins and sharper minds do higher in the age of the Streisand impact.

Yet the British authorities and the European Union seem to have taken a totally different lesson.

They’re persevering with their efforts to censor speech they don’t like — even when that speech seems on platforms situated outside their international locations. 

So far they’ve had no luck scrubbing American content material, but that might change if a future presidential administration decides that censoring speech, in “cooperation” with other thin-skinned pols, is something they can get away with.

Joe Biden tried it with his aborted Disinformation Governance Board, after all.

You can wager that such a censorship regime, bought under anodyne phrases like “safety” or “civility,” will in truth be about defending politicians’ egos from mockery — and their crimes from publicity.

Free speech and a free press place the public’s proper to know — important in a democracy where the individuals are, at least in principle, the rulers — above politicians’ curiosity in sustaining their dignity and their phony-baloney jobs. 

That’s why they’re enshrined in the US Constitution, and why they are — or were — enshrined in Britain’s unwritten structure, too.

We must defend free speech with every software at our disposal, parody included. 

If politicians’ emotions are harm, that’s robust.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of legislation at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com weblog.