I've known about the Streisand effect for a long time. But I'd never seen this in real time until last week, when Facebook parent company Meta's tactics had at least 8 million people eager to read exactly what Meta is trying to suppress.
The phenomenon is named after Barbra Streisand, who in 2003 attempted to remove a photo of her clifftop Malibu mansion from the Internet and only succeeded in making it the most viewed house on the Internet. This happens sometimes: powerful people try to make something disappear and instead make it impossible to ignore. Meta, a company that knows more about human behavior than perhaps any institution in history, might have seen this coming. It seems that it was not like that. Because on June 30, after appearing with writer and former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams on a British podcast, Meta was hit by the Streisand effect.
Meta sued Wynn-Williams to stop him from promoting “Careless People,” alleging that the revelations he shared in it violated their employment agreement, and won a temporary ruling barring him from speaking about the book. (She has countersued.) By seeking financially ruinous penalties if she disobeys, Meta set the stage for a surreal viral moment.
Last week I was in London to help promote “Nobody's Girl,” Virginia Roberts Giuffre's memoir on which I collaborated. It chronicles the life of Giuffre, who committed suicide in April 2025, and details the abuse she suffered at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein, among others.
Wynn-Williams and I were guests during my visit on “The News Agents” podcast, but of course she couldn't talk about “Careless People” due to the temporary court ruling. Does it seem uncomfortable? It was, but our presenter, former BBC journalist Emily Maitlis, whose 2019 interview with then-Prince Andrew is a masterclass in strategic interrogation, had a plan.
During the episode, he read aloud a letter he had received from Wynn-Williams' attorney: “I must ask that you refrain from engaging in any conversation about Meta or Ms. Wynn-Williams' book during your appearance on the podcast.” Then Maitlis fired Wynn-Williams.
“I actually can't believe I'm saying this,” Maitlis told him sternly, “but… I'm going to ask you to leave the studio. Because you can't be present for the conversation we now need to have.”
Next, Maitlis and I discussed Wynn-Williams's book, the themes of which were eerily familiar to me from Giuffre's story.
Wynn-Williams herself made this clear when she spoke at the British Book Awards in May. She and Giuffre shared an award, but Wynn-Williams' speech focused solely on Giuffre's book: “The people Virginia told us about had grown rich and powerful with the knowledge that they would never be held accountable. So they deployed every weapon that money can buy against a woman whose only weapon was her voice. They tried to exhaust her, to make the cost of speaking so high, so relentless, so total, that eventually the spirit would give up before the truth. But “There is something strange here. When you try so hard to silence a woman who tells the truth, you announce to the entire world that the truth must be very dangerous.”
In other words: the Streisand effect.
The podcast was released late on June 30, and to date, 8.1 million people have viewed the trailer on Instagram (ironically, owned by Meta) showing Maitlis ousting Wynn-Williams. (Among the more than 11,000 comments, many said something like this: “I'm going to buy the book NOW.”) When you combine that number with the 276,000 people who watched the podcast episode on YouTube and the 252,000 who listened to it on various platforms, it's no surprise that book sales skyrocketed. In the United States, “Careless People” rose from No. 625 on Amazon's best-seller list to No. 15. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, the book enjoyed its biggest weekly sales, rising from No. 97 to No. 1.
Meta set out to prevent people from hearing what Wynn-Williams has to say. Instead, the company just made sure to reach millions of new potential readers. Babs could have told them how this would end.
Amy Wallace collaborated with Virginia Roberts Giuffre to write “Nobody's Girl.”
