Sometimes, common sense isn’t common enough.  Google, Apple, Facebook and Spotify might want to take notes.

In 2003, millionaire songstress Barbara Streisand sued an unknown photographer for $50-million for taking aerial photographs of her seaside California mansion. At the time of the lawsuit, only six people, (mostly lawyers,) had seen the photograph which was taken as part of a conservation project compilation to visually track the incursion of wind and water erosion on the California coastline.  Thanks to her own litigious overreaction, the photograph of Streisand’s mansion ran in every major newspaper in the world making the location of her home an easy pilgrimage for fans, well-wishers and paparazzo from that day forward, privacy be damned.

Thanks to a concerted and clearly collusive effort to ban, censor, silence and bankrupt conservative firebrand talk host Alex Jones, Barbara’s namesake legal phenomenon may soon undergo a name change.  The Alex Jones Effect.  And it’s no surprise.

Just days after multiple facebook pages, YouTube accounts and podcast streaming services were interrupted or deleted entirely by the largest digital platforms in the world, Alex Jones is now the most searched term on Google and his newly-launched phone app is number one in the news category, topping CNN and prompting calls for both Google and Apple to ban downloads of the Alex Jones app to stop the surge.  CNN is practically begging their case over Twitter as Jones’ brand doubles and triples in name awareness in the span of a week. As if we didn’t already know they have bricks for brains.  Chuckle.

As shown by this graph, Google analytics indicate search queries for Infowars or Alex Jones have increased 1,300% in the past seven days.  A tectonic move.

Pilloried in the mainstream press and reviled by leftists and some conservatives alike, the attempted expulsion from internet prominence has had exactly the reverse of the intended effect of facebook and YouTube when they announced Monday the cancellation of Jones’ distribution channels and fan pages on both platforms.  To their chagrin, the label of social pariah is instead being replaced by Jones as the unlikely martyr and to many observers, the poster case for leftist dictatorial criminalization of dissenting opinion and the shaming of conservative speech.

Whatever your opinion of Jones’ content, it’s clear that once again, the mainstream media and authoritarian technobots in Silicon Valley are discovering the hard way that the Orwellian plunge of cancelling someone’s digital personhood or revoking their internet phone listing unavoidably create a bushel basket of unintended consequences, not the least of which may prove an historic test case in the actual connotations and protections for free speech in the digital age.  At the very least, Barbara Streisand’s publicists are enjoying the temporary resurgence of a fallen star thanks to the legal terminology bearing her name that shows every sign of having greater longevity than her song catalog ever could.