Tintin and the Streisand Effect

Thanks to Expat Yank, I discovered the Streisand Effect proven in action again. This time, it’s in the case of Tintin:

Sales of a Tintin comic book have rocketed by 3,800 per cent after Britain’s equality watchdog claimed that it depicted “hideous racial prejudice”.    

The Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) condemned Tintin In The Congo for making black people “look like monkeys and talk like imbeciles” and called for it to be taken off the shelves.

But its intervention seems only to have increased the popularity of the controversial book about the boy reporter, as by last night it had reached number eight on Amazon’s most popular books list.

The Internet retailer said Tintin In The Congo had “jumped” into the top 10 since the CRE’s comments, which followed a complaint by a member of the public.

These days, I suspect Indian celebrities are using the Streisand Effect to their advantage by creating controversy around themselves and thus staying in the limelight. Now are these regulatory moral brigades and censorship bodies going to get wise? Or do they need to do the same for the same reasons?

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