Ten days later, Macklemore was dropped from the tour after Robert Kraft, owner of the NFL\u2019s New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium \u2013 a future stop on Sheeran\u2019s \u201cLoop\u201d tour \u2013 thought the 43-year-old rapper had crossed a line<\/a>. <\/p>\n In a Sept. 14 Instagram post<\/a>, Macklemore detailed how Kraft had pressured Sheeran to drop Macklemore from the tour and had convinced other stadium owners to prevent him from performing at their venues.<\/p>\n Yet the ensuing media coverage sent the rapper\u2019s profile soaring. There was little to no interest in Macklemore\u2019s Sept. 4 speech<\/a> the day after he delivered it, yet searches for that speech shot up. His Instagram follower count ballooned by over 1.6 million<\/a> in the days after he was dropped. Streams of his songs skyrocketed<\/a>. In an act of solidarity, all of Sheeran\u2019s other opening acts withdrew from the tour<\/a>, and at least one radio network pulled Sheeran\u2019s music from its rotation<\/a>.<\/p>\n There was initially little interest in Macklemore\u2019s Sept. 4, 2026, pro-Palestine monologue. Only 10 days later, after the rapper was dropped from Ed Sheeran\u2019s tour, did Google searches for the monologue spike.<\/p>\n This pattern has a name: the Streisand effect<\/a>.<\/p>\n In 2003, singer Barbra Streisand tried to remove aerial photos of her home from the internet. But her efforts to take down the images only drove more people to seek them out.<\/p>\n Two decades later, the Streisand effect has become a kind of internet maxim: Trying to bury something often ends up amplifying it. Working with colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University and George Mason University, I wanted to explore how this phenomenon plays out<\/a> \u2013 and whether it\u2019s simply internet folk wisdom or something that can be backed up with data.<\/p>\n Be careful what you wish for<\/p>\n To do so, we focused on one of the more contentious censorship trends of the past few years: book bans.<\/p>\n Since 2021, attempts to ban books in U.S. public schools and libraries have risen sharply, and they have most often targeted books dealing with issues like race and gender. Organizations like the American Library Association have diligently kept track of banning efforts. In 2021, the library association reported<\/a> 729 unique attempts to ban books. The following year, that number grew to 1,269<\/a>.<\/p>\n Using a large-scale dataset of library circulation records spanning 18 months, from January 2021 to June 2022, across 38 U.S. states, we analyzed what happened to monthly circulation counts for titles once they were targeted with bans. <\/p>\n We found that on average, circulation rose by 12% in the six-month period following the ban compared with nonbanned books with similar pre-ban monthly circulations.<\/p>\n This increase was not evenly distributed across all the banned books. The effect was actually concentrated almost entirely among books written by lesser-known authors. And the more times a book was banned, the larger the circulation increase, with each additional school district\u2019s removal of the same book adding roughly 2% to circulation, on average. <\/p>\n The increase wasn\u2019t confined to the places where these bans originate. Even in states with no ban on the books, circulation rose by about 11%, nearly as much as in the states where the bans actually happened. Whatever the proponents of a ban were trying to accomplish at a local school district level, its effect on demand often traveled well beyond the district where the books were challenged.<\/p>\n Local bans get national attention<\/p>\n Book bans are not a new phenomenon in the U.S. Many books considered classics today have been<\/a> banned on and off<\/a> for decades<\/a>. <\/p>\n A Minnesota bookstore displays titles that have been targeted with bans in May 2026. But the response to the current crop of bans has been different. <\/p>\n Earlier bans were usually covered by local newspapers and then eventually forgotten. In our study, we were able to show how these more recent bans attracted a measurable spike in local news coverage. National outlets picked up on these local stories, and news of these bans then fanned out through social media on platforms like X, reaching millions.<\/p>\n We argue that this heightened awareness directly translated to the boosts in circulation. Books that generated significant discussion on social media, like \u201cGender Queer<\/a>\u201d and \u201cLawn Boy<\/a>,\u201d saw large circulation increases, while banned titles that did not receive much social media attention essentially experienced no bump.<\/p>\n Taken together, the results point to a simple dynamic: Book bans can draw attention to obscure titles, and that attention can, in turn, lead to discovery. Consider the scale of the competition each book faces in getting discovered. More than 4 million books were published<\/a> in the U.S. in 2025 alone. In a marketplace that crowded, the hardest problem most books face isn\u2019t censorship \u2013 it\u2019s obscurity.<\/p>\n A ban, paradoxically, solves that problem. It lifts a single title out of the millions and puts a spotlight on it, often reaching an audience that had no idea it existed.<\/p>\n In the attention economy, trying to bury a book, performer and song can just as easily give them a second wind. And whatever the intent behind removing Macklemore from Ed Sheeran\u2019s tour, his message has reached far more people than that opening set at MetLife Stadium ever did \u2013 the same way several banned books made their way on to the bestseller list<\/a>.<\/p>\n ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/file-20260929-50-nvapsm.png\")
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\n Michael Siluk\/UCG\/Universal Images Group via Getty Images<\/a><\/p>\n