Intuit’s PR Team Has Seemingly Never Heard of the Streisand Effect
Nilay Patel, after interviewing Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi for his Decoder podcast at The Verge:
It’s also not just lobbying: in 2022, a coalition of attorneys
general from all 50 states got Intuit to agree to a $141 million
settlement that required Intuit to refund low-income
Americans who were eligible for free filing but were redirected to
paid products. In 2023, the FTC found that TurboTax’s “free”
marketing was willfully deceptive, and after the agency won an
appeal early this year, Intuit was ordered to stop doing
it.
I asked about that, and Sasan disagreed with me, and we went back
and forth for a few minutes on it. It’s Decoder; we have exchanges
like this all the time, and I didn’t think anything of it.
But then I got a note from Rick Heineman, the chief communications
officer at Intuit, who called the line of questioning and my tone
“inappropriate,” “egregious,” and “disappointing” and demanded
that we delete that entire section of the recording. I mean,
literally — he wrote a long email that ended with “at the very
least the end portion of your interview should be deleted.”
We don’t do that here at The Verge.
What’s bananas about this is that the contentious segment of the interview … wasn’t really all that contentious? If not for this controversy generated entirely by Intuit’s own comms chief, I’d have listened to the episode and might not have even thought twice about the whole segment on Intuit’s lobbying against the IRS and tax code being updated to eliminate the need for complicated tax filing. Of course Patel was going to bring this up. It’d have been shocking if he hadn’t. And I think Sasan presented Intuit’s case about as well it can be presented.
But now the episode has been the number one story at The Verge all day, and surely getting way more listens than the average Decoder episode — with listeners primed to pay attention to the segment on Intuit’s anti-tax-reform lobbying and the penalty they were fined for bilking low-income users into paid service they didn’t need.
And the Streisand effect isn’t counterintuitive. It’s obvious human nature. We want to look at and listen to things we’re told not to look at or listen to.
★
Nilay Patel, after interviewing Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi for his Decoder podcast at The Verge:
It’s also not just lobbying: in 2022, a coalition of attorneys
general from all 50 states got Intuit to agree to a $141 million
settlement that required Intuit to refund low-income
Americans who were eligible for free filing but were redirected to
paid products. In 2023, the FTC found that TurboTax’s “free”
marketing was willfully deceptive, and after the agency won an
appeal early this year, Intuit was ordered to stop doing
it.
I asked about that, and Sasan disagreed with me, and we went back
and forth for a few minutes on it. It’s Decoder; we have exchanges
like this all the time, and I didn’t think anything of it.
But then I got a note from Rick Heineman, the chief communications
officer at Intuit, who called the line of questioning and my tone
“inappropriate,” “egregious,” and “disappointing” and demanded
that we delete that entire section of the recording. I mean,
literally — he wrote a long email that ended with “at the very
least the end portion of your interview should be deleted.”
We don’t do that here at The Verge.
What’s bananas about this is that the contentious segment of the interview … wasn’t really all that contentious? If not for this controversy generated entirely by Intuit’s own comms chief, I’d have listened to the episode and might not have even thought twice about the whole segment on Intuit’s lobbying against the IRS and tax code being updated to eliminate the need for complicated tax filing. Of course Patel was going to bring this up. It’d have been shocking if he hadn’t. And I think Sasan presented Intuit’s case about as well it can be presented.
But now the episode has been the number one story at The Verge all day, and surely getting way more listens than the average Decoder episode — with listeners primed to pay attention to the segment on Intuit’s anti-tax-reform lobbying and the penalty they were fined for bilking low-income users into paid service they didn’t need.
And the Streisand effect isn’t counterintuitive. It’s obvious human nature. We want to look at and listen to things we’re told not to look at or listen to.