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

You’ve seen this social-media phenomenon in action whenever a powerful person’s attempt to suppress online information backfires spectacularly.

It became an early Internet meme after Barbra Streisand sued to scrub a photo of her Malibu estate from the Internet in 2003 — and turned a little-noticed pic that had been viewed all of six times into a joke that 500,000 people downloaded.  

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

Take Britain’s Simon Bennett, a local pol with a seat on the city council of Wolverhampton, a small city near Birmingham.

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

The West Midlands Police, incredibly, didn’t just visit Fraser: They arrested him, seized his devices and took him in for questioning.

But if you don’t want people sharing a picture of you as a bunny rabbit, you probably shouldn’t call attention to it. 

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

Before the police action, Fraser’s original Facebook post was only seen by a relatively small audience — now the picture of bunny-rabbit Bennett has been viewed by millions.

UK police arrested Fraser for the photo.

The image has been widely reproduced in news coverage (The New York Post, The Telegraph and others) and has gone viral on social media.

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

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

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

None of this is a surprise — indeed, any competent lawyer or media professional should have advised Bennett to lay off the kid. 

And the damage to Bennett’s reputation could be permanent.

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

Not only will Bennett’s constituents and future voters see Fraser’s joke picture, they’ll learn that Bennett is the kind of guy who sends a squad of cops after a kid for a Facebook post.

The Streisand incident was almost 25 years ago.  Even a politician should have figured things out by now.

But in the UK as well as in Europe, the urge to censor irritating online speech maintains a powerful pull.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has reportedly filed hundreds of police reports against online critics for calling him “Pinocchio” and other petty insults.

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

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

Andy Grote, another German politician, sent police after a Twitter user who called him a pimmel — street slang for penis. 

The charges 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 obvious: Thicker skins and sharper minds do better in the age of the Streisand effect.

Yet the British government and the European Union appear to have taken a different lesson.

They’re continuing their efforts to censor speech they don’t like — even when that speech appears on platforms located outside their countries. 

So far they’ve had no luck scrubbing American content, 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 bet that such a censorship regime, sold under anodyne terms like “safety” or “civility,” will in fact be about protecting politicians’ egos from mockery — and their crimes from exposure.

Free speech and a free press place the public’s right to know — essential in a democracy where the people are, at least in theory, the rulers — above politicians’ interest in maintaining 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 constitution, too.

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

If politicians’ feelings are hurt, that’s tough.

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