Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 109

Porn “disruption” makes Stormy Daniels a rare success in increasingly abusive industry

AP/Damairs Carter

Stephanie Clifford, better known as Stormy Daniels, rocketed to fame recently by challenging a non-disclosure agreement tied to the US$130,000 payoff she received to keep silent about her alleged sexual relationship with the president.

As a result, Clifford has secured numerous mainstream media appearances, including a recent interview on “60 Minutes.”

Journalists and interviewers universally call her a “porn star.” While it’s true that she was a performer and has now become a successful producer, her story is exceptional. The vast majority of women in the industry suffer abusive working conditions and don’t progress to real careers.

We — a sociologist and a business professor — have been studying the world of porn for years, chronicling how internet-fueled disruptions in the industry are causing conditions to further deteriorate.

"Corporatization" of porn

Well before her entanglement with President Donald Trump, Stormy Daniels was a well-known name in the porn industry.

Unlike most performers, who rarely last more than six months on the set, Clifford has appeared in more than 250 films since 2000. In 2002, she entered an exclusive contract with Wicked Pictures, a studio that specializes in longer features with a pretense of a storyline. She is also one of the very few women who have transitioned to production, directing more than 90 films.

Yet while she has prospered in the small and struggling feature segment of the business, the mainstream industry that mass-produces short hardcore segments has changed beyond recognition. Industry journalist Steven Yagielowicz calls this transformation the “corporatization of porn.”

“It’s Las Vegas all over again: the independent owners, renegade mobsters and visionary entrepreneurs pushed aside by mega-corporations that saw a better way of doing things and brought the discipline needed to attain a whole new level of success to the remaining players,” he wrote in 2009.

This has generated a monopolistic system of distribution, while production has become more fragmented, with dire consequences for performers.

The MindGeek monopoly

The early days of the internet enabled rapid market growth and attracted a proliferation of new entrants eager to make easy money.

Over time, the porn industry pioneered new business models and innovated new technologies that subsequently permeated the wider economy. Few people realize that porn has driven the development of cross-platform technologies for data compression, file-sharing and micropayments.

It also developed the “free platforms” model that monetize user traffic through sophisticated techniques that cross-link numerous websites and encourage upgrade to “premium” pay-to-play sites. This allowed a few better resourced companies to grow rapidly and swallow up their smaller competitors who lacked the scale and capabilities to compete.

The biggest winner from this process was MindGeek (formerly called Manwin), which gained a monopolistic dominance over the distribution of mainstream porn. As the company rather grandiosely proclaims on its site, it drives “the state of technology forward, developing industry-leading solutions enabling faster, more efficient delivery of content” and “thrives on a sustainable growth trajectory built on innovation and excellence.”

MindGeek owns most of the top free “porn-tube” sites, including Pornhub and RedTube, as well as at least a dozen prominent branded pay-sites, such as Reality Kings and Brazzers, each of which contains thousands of videos organized by genre. Users click through from site to site, without realizing that they are in a highly structured network optimized to maximize revenues. MindGeek is secretive about its finances, but just one of its subsidiaries that processes subscriptions disclosed 2015 revenues of $234 million, or more than $600,000 a day.

Porn sweatshops

This concentration at the distribution end of the value chain gives MindGeek and a few other large companies tremendous market power over producers, who find themselves fragmented and squeezed financially as they supply cheap, usually unbranded commodity videos to the big distributor networks.

The business model mirrors that of YouTube, where consumers surf for free, and content providers hope to make some money from popular videos they upload. But it is the platform that makes the lion’s share of profits. Many producers also complain that the porn tubes engage in rampant piracy, further weakening them.

The model is also similar to that of other platforms that connect consumers with service providers, such as Uber and TaskRabbit, where the platform holds a dominant market position and controls the conditions for drivers or other service providers.

With the internet facilitating the globalization of value chains, and a growing movement to regulate health and safety conditions for porn production in California and elsewhere in the U.S., production is increasingly moving offshore. This is giving rise to a sweatshop model resembling that of the clothing industry before anyone had heard of corporate social responsibility.

Studios such as Daniels’ Wicked are now struggling to survive as the industry moves to low-cost production, less regulated “amateur-style” porn. As a result, applications for porn-shoot permits in Los Angeles County fell by 95 percent from 2012 to 2015. Even Wicked’s website is now managed by MindGeek.

The concentration of power with porn distributors and the fragmentation of production has hurt performers, who mostly toil without contracts or benefits in a “gig economy” controlled by the distribution platforms. They are paid per sex act, and wages have declined across the board. In addition, performers need to cover significant out of pocket expenses themselves, including HIV tests.

As a result, performers are under pressure to do more dangerous acts, such as anal sex or double penetration, that pay more but increase risks of disease or physical damage. Many supplement their income with webcam shows and prostitution, which are known in the industry as “privates.”

The Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation, a Los Angeles-based organization (now closed) that monitored the health of performers listed on its website the injuries and diseases to which porn performers are prone, including HIV, rectal and throat gonorrhea, chlamydia of the eye, and tearing of the throat, vagina and anus. It’s no surprise, then, that the average performer’s “career” is less than six months.

Porn and politics

Despite the industry’s efforts to portray itself as progressive and sexually liberating, it has been especially aggressive in organizing against regulations to protect performers. And MindGeek’s market muscle has translated into political power.

This is most evident in its campaign to defeat Measure B in Los Angeles County, which mandates the use of condoms and requires production companies to obtain a health permit. The company poured over $300,000 into this effort, mobilized business allies, and set up fake “astroturf” groups such as the Council of Concerned Women Voters. All of this was to promote the message that Measure B was unwarranted and intrusive government regulation that infringed on the performers’ rights.

At other times MindGeek appears to support “intrusive” regulation. It recently backed U.K. proposals for mandatory age verification for viewers on porn sites and has already established its own platform, AgeID, for this. The motivation isn’t exactly altruistic, however, as industry observers suggest that not only will MindGeek make money by licensing this product, it will also serve a gatekeeper function that will further consolidate its monopoly control.

Ultimately, in our view, the industry is unsalvageable. The porn industry has always been abusive, and the situation has only deteriorated as distribution has been monopolized. Whatever some might say, there is no such thing as “socially responsible” porn.

Stephanie Clifford is now trying to hold accountable the most powerful man in the country for his alleged abuse of power. We argue it is time to do the same for the porn industry.

Gail Dines, Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies, Wheelock College and David L Levy, Professor of Management, Director of the Center for Sustainable Enterprise and Regional Competitiveness, University of Massachusetts Boston

Tracing “Trump’s Takeover”: A chat with “Frontline” producer Michael Kirk

Reuters/Carlos Barria/PBS

“Trump’s Takeover,” filmmaker Michael Kirk’s latest hour for “Frontline,” debuts on PBS member stations Tuesday at 10 p.m. It is a close and precise examination of Donald Trump’s steady and eventually victorious bid to take control of the Republican Party as told through the perspectives of Trump surrogates past and present, a few lawmakers willing to go in front of Kirk’s camera (notably Arizona Senator Jeff Flake), and journalists closely covering this administration.

In terms of its timespan, “Trump’s Takeover” begins with Trump’s ascension to win the Republican party’s nomination and closes with the only major political victory of his first year in office, December’s passage of the party’s tax bill.

It is now April – tax month. Even so, that bill’s passage feels like it happened ages ago. And yet in a time when the shelf life of news feels precariously brief, “Trump’s Takeover” feels particularly pertinent. Right now Americans are waiting to see whether the president will trigger a constitutional crisis by firing special counsel Robert Mueller. This new hour largely steers clear of the investigation, instead drilling down on how what one of its experts referred to as a Faustian bargain came to be struck between Republican lawmakers and Trump. And it's a concise background work that explains why what could happen next may serve as a strenuous test of the GOP's soul as well as our democracy.

Contextualizing recent history to grant the audience broader basis of understanding what's happening now has long been the vital strength of “Frontline,” and Kirk, who served as the series’ senior producer from its 1983 debut through 1987, helped establish the framework upon which its reputation is built.  In the 35 years he’s spent with “Frontline” Kirk has covered a number of presidencies and produced hours examining each given administration’s key subjects and policies. He’s produced more than 200 national television programs.

Never before has he contended with a president like Trump.

“Here's the thing about the Trump administration, or about him,” Kirk observed on Monday, in a phone interview with Salon. “I'm not saying anything particularly surprising here, but every day it's a new tweet. And it's been our policy not to succumb. With him, that's really hard.”

No politician ever makes Kirk’s job easy, of course.  “But this [administration] has been completely different,” the producer admits. “It's all so out front and all over the place. How do you know what really matters and how do you stay true to your plumb line? That’s a hard thing to do when you take six months to make something, and so many things happen.”

Not long after hanging up with Kirk, the news broke that FBI agents had raided the home and office of Trump's personal lawyer Michael Cohen. No doubt Kirk and "Frontline" will have plenty to reveal about the raid and all that results from it within the next few months.

In the meantime, he had lots of interesting things to say about his experience in making “Trump’s Takeover” and its companion piece “McCain,” airing next week, as well as his candid thoughts on the state of journalism and documentary filmmaking as it is realized by outlets such as Vice. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

I’ve watched so many of your documentaries, not only the ones that cover the current administration but those addressing all the various elections and presidencies that have come before. Did you find that you had to approach “Trump’s Takeover” differently than previous works?

Well, I knew that we had to talk to Republicans about it who often in the past have been really reluctant to dish about the sitting President of The United States, whether it happened to be George Bush or somebody else. In this particular case, we've had pretty good luck leading up. I think this is our fifth Trump film, or a film that had Trump-related content in it. And we've started to, you know, the White House is actually letting us talk to some people. Not always the ones we want, but here and there we’ve begun to get a little bit of an inroad.

But it's never easy. The same is true with Congress. Whether we got people on camera or not,  we were at least able to talk to a number of people and the people who work closely with him. We got close with [Speaker of the House Paul] Ryan. I really wanted to spend time with him. I knew we probably wouldn't get [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell this go around. But, I really wanted to talk to Ryan and we got close, but didn't quite make it happen.

So that was the first challenge: Could we get Republicans from Congress to really talk to us about what they thought at the beginning and what they thought now. And in the end, Flake became the most realistic choice, because his story arc goes from the summer to December. We got a couple of lengthy interviews with him, which was very good for us just in terms of understanding the story.

To follow up on something you mentioned earlier . . . But it is noticeable that you don't have input from Ryan or other big Republicans in Congress. You’ve spoken to that, but I am curious, since I have seen them in past ‘Frontline’ documentaries, to get your take on why it is that, for this subject in particular, that they declined to appear on camera.

Well, it's never a direct, ‘Can't do it.’ ‘Don't wanna do it.’ ‘Aren't interested in doing it.’ It's always, and this is not news to you, it's always a scheduling conflict. It's, "We'd love to do this. We're interested in doing this but, we just . . . We can't get it together when you guys are here or when you guys wanna shoot."

Senators and powerful congresspeople are harder to get your arms around because they won't leave the building. And in some ways our own limitations, logistic limitations, don’t allow for a 10 minute interview. I just say, "I don't want a 10 minute interview. I need an hour." I have to have an hour for what I do. I don't want to just to have you appear, Speaker Ryan, for 10 minutes and give me three stock answers.

The people who say yes, like Flake and others, are prepared to sit down. I mean, Flake has his own motivations, obviously. The real test is, are they saying something that's moving the narrative along in a way that's really useful? And an awful lot of the time, they aren't.

Let’s go back to something you said earlier about this particular presidency. We're not that far into it. But you said you've done, at least by your count five, five ‘Frontline’ episodes so far on Trump.

I think so. Let's count them together. ‘The Choice,’ which was the woven biography of Trump and Hillary, so right before the election. Then there was ‘President Trump,’ which was a sort of pull together of the bits of that and the things we didn't get in the other film. So maybe it's one, together that's one. ‘Trump's Road To The White House.’ ‘Bannon's War,’ which was really a Trump film. So that's three or four. We did the two-hour ‘Putin's Revenge,’ which had a substantial Trump component. And then this one, ‘Trump's Takeover.’ And next week, ‘McCain’. So I guess that somewhere in there, there's five, at least five.

Okay.

We sort of vowed to ourselves we'd do 12 before he left, at least. The day after he was elected I said to Raney Aronson, the executive producer [of ‘Frontline’] and she agreed. I said, ‘It seems to me this is a little bit like it was on 9/11, where we just said, this is why we're here and had these resources and let's explain this. You know, let's talk about both how this happened and what's happening, because it's happened.’ And we'll keep doing that for as long as we can.

I have to say I find it interesting that you compared the election of Trump to 9/11 in terms of the coverage.

I know, I know. It just seems like this: You know, we made seven or eight films during the Obama administration. We made probably 20 films about 9/11. We'll never make 20 about Trump. But as with 9/11 and all of its dimensions, what I'm really talking about is something really very important that anybody who does long form journalism would consider worth spending their time on.

. . . A lot of people can tell you they knew Trump was going to win. But, everybody missed that there was something going on out in the country, and that the implications of who Donald Trump is are historic, for at least our generation. It is a big important political story with ramifications that reverberate all through Washington, when you're there through every element of the administrative state, and the dark state, and every other state. You just really feel its impact profoundly.

Maybe 9/11 is first by a long shot, but this is big stuff. And in a way journalism isn't up to it. Things have happened to the journalism business. Good people are still trying to be good but resources are diminishing and there's again a kind of a sea change in the attitude of a lot of places, a lot of journalism organizations.

We’re in an already divided country. There's another film we had, about a half of a film about Trump, ‘Divided States of America.’ .It just feels like this division that's happening in the country and what his election means for that is profound. So, maybe I didn't mean to overstate it and certainly not insult anybody that lost anybody during . . . a lot of lives have been lost as a result of 9/11. But something really important is happening here. And from my point of view, as somebody who made a lot of films after 9/11 and a lot of films during the Obama administration, this feels equally as a powerful moment.

Wait. You said you did seven or eight during Obama's administration. Do you mean during one of his terms in office, or over the course of the full eight years?

I would say around seven or eight. And probably eight by the time he got all the way around to the end. And we just, you know, I can't remember them all to tell you the truth.

You're saying that about someone who was in office for eight years versus, you've made six films about Trump, and he hasn't been in office for two. Or even one and a half.

Exactly.

This takes us back what you said about the speed of news breaking all the time.

Yeah.Yeah.

With the speed of everything happening in with this administration, how many films might this presidency yield? You're saying that, "Okay, we've done like five or six already." But given the pace of everything that’s breaking, by the end of this year you may have enough for 12.

You just scared me to death.

It's very possible. The last scene of ‘Trump’s Takeover’ shows the tax cut coverage, right?  That was in December. A lot has happened since then.

That's right.

Does that change the way that your schedule works, just in terms of planning?

No. As I said, we try not to succumb to the bright, shiny objects that continue to appear on the table. We keep looking for and we keep trying to pay attention to the big structural moments, the big things that really happen.

It matters what happened to the Republican party over the last year, I think. It matters as we head into a midterm election that may yield a ‘blue wave’ or something even more surprising. Who knows?  So I try really hard not to succumb, and it's hard. But, to make it worthy of two hours  or one hour of somebody's time to watch and learn from it, and have it live on as a kind of  record of what was happening at a certain time, you have to be really selective about what you pick. And it's really hard to hold your fire sometimes, you know.

I'm curious to hear your take on what this particular administration tells you about, just in view of our longer history, about where we're going as a country.

I feel a trendline, you know, as do you. Is journalism getting better, more sophisticated, more intelligent? …I worry a lot about broadcast journalism and online journalism and digital journalism. I worry about the lack of curiosity and openness. I worry about that, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to have this amount of time and money, and especially time to research, to edit and shoot and think about a [documentary] and time on the air. You know, it's a rare privilege and opportunity that I have that I don't see a lot of other people having and I'm sorry about that.

. . . You know, the rise of Vice is heartbreaking to somebody like me. It just breaks my heart for the people who have to practice it and the people who think they like it and watch it. People have always liked car accidents, you know. They will always like them. But it's not what I hoped the world would be embracing in terms of long form or broadcast or digital journalism.

When you say it's heartbreaking, what exactly do you mean? There are people who watch Vice and don’t see a problem with it.

It's bread and circuses. It's not considered. It doesn't feel considered to me. It doesn't feel thoughtful to me. It doesn't feel humanistic to me. It's voyeuristic, and it's slapdash. Its techniques are the techniques of the carnival. It's hard, I think, to be serious about the story. And I'm not saying by any stretch of the imagination we're perfect or scintillating to watch. I mean I struggled with how to keep it interesting for people. In an environment where they're used to getting their journalism in three-minute clumps from Facebook, how do I convince somebody to spend 52 minutes watching ‘Trump's Takeover’? Can I? Can I expect them to do it, and do I have the right to complain about somebody who can get a billion dollars and making, you know, whatever that is? That's always been with us.

So it's easy, I guess, to complain about Vice. It's harder but necessary to complain about where are the big companies that are making all the money. Where's their journalism impulses for serious stuff. They're covering it all day to day and that's always been with us, but where's the serious commitment to thoughtful and hard to make television because it . . . Journalism on television is a hard thing to do.

Especially when you’re contending with a flood. That may be more difficult in these days, not just in terms of the economic pressures that companies put on journalistic organizations. But the sheer deluge of distractions that seem to be demanding coverage while some other actions are going on behind the scenes.

It’s true. . . . In that environment it gets harder to compete when you want to say, take your time, slow down. Just spend an hour here, like meditation or something and just think about something that's happening and how big and important and structural, and maybe even epic, it is. We're right on the edge of the news. So it's like we're really what we used to call history on horseback, right. We really don't have time to really consider it the way that you might three decades from now. So we're right in the, just one day after. We go in just as the circus leaves town and look at what was left under the grandstands. It's really, it's still fresh and warm and there it is. It's just, it's not what happened today or even last week but it's close to that.

I got Zucked: Cambridge Analytica may have my Facebook data now

Getty/Salon

Today I learned via a message in my Facebook feed that at least one of my 1,300 friends was among the 270,000 who played along with the now-infamous personality quiz app “This Is Your Digital Life” in 2014. Designed by psychology professor Aleksandr Kogan, the app scraped private information from participants’ profiles, which potentially includes information from their Facebook friends — to the tune of an estimated 87 million users — and “improperly shared” it with Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm founded by conservative mega-donor Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon, who went on to head up Donald Trump's presidential campaign. Whistleblower Christopher Wylie now says Bannon wanted the Facebook data to support Republican and alt-right candidates for U.S. office.

Because friendship apparently means never barring your former neighbor, your 11th grade study buddy or a guy you once worked with four jobs ago from handing over a record of all the random things you’ve approved of on Mark Zuckerberg’s platform, Cambridge Analytica probably knows where I live, how old I am, and that I am a total fangirl for the J. Peterman Company. (My caftan game is strong.)

Thanks, Zuck! All that juicy info handed over without a fight and Steve Bannon didn’t even send an Edible Arrangement for my birthday, which he can’t say now he doesn’t know.

"We understand the importance of keeping your data safe," Facebook tells me with, I assume, a straight face, before detailing what Cambridge Analytica could have had on me for the last few years because a friend used their app. "There is more work to do, but we are committed to confronting abuse and to putting you in control of your privacy."

In a post-Snowden landscape where memes about being spied on by your own personal FBI agent flourish, the idea that I could be in control of my own digital privacy is downright quaint. But this hand-off of my personal information is as shady as it sounds. While back in 2014, the data-scraping itself didn’t violate the platform’s privacy rules for third-party applications, snitching it out to Steve Bannon did, according to Facebook.

It's true that I have no idea how my information was used, if at all. It's unclear what psychographic profile can be constructed from my affinity for the Jim Henson holiday classic “Emmett Otter’s Jug Band Christmas”; and on the scale of advertising-persuadable 2016 voters I'm probably a "Huma Abedin," so who knows if the information Facebook allowed my friend's app to scrape from my profile was ever used for anything nefarious. But that’s not really the point.

Look, I’m not an innocent. I know that on a free platform like Facebook, I am the product being pitched to advertisers. This is an agreement I entered into willingly, and I am actually not complaining about that. According to my records, Facebook already had me pegged as “very liberal,” a frequent traveler and an engaged shopper for its own advertising purposes, which are quite effective as the pairs of shoes I have purchased off in-feed ads demonstrate. Take my one-sentence rave review of “Black Panther” or my vacation photos from Bogotá and try to sell me more of the same — fine.

I know that every keystroke and click I make on the internet is stored somewhere and used by someone to try to get me to buy something. I grew up following the storylines of fictional cartoon characters created by toy companies with the sole objective of selling me their plastic figurine likenesses. I have a distinct preschool memory of consciously reading the word “McDonald’s” on the sign, after I learned my ABCs and what the big golden arched M stands for. I’m an American. Someone’s been trying to sell me something since the day I was born.

But allowing someone else to to dig around in our pockets without our knowledge and give whatever they fish out to people associated closely with a presidential campaign without asking first is something entirely different. Facebook’s failure to ensure such loopholes were not available for exploitation is a breach of trust — however thin that trust was in the first place — and carries with it a certain amount of moral culpability at the very least. After all, it was Facebook that convinced so many people to be extremely themselves online — to become the willing product — in the first place.

Back in the day, before Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat, if you used social platforms like message boards or blog services or chat rooms, you probably used a pseudonym of some sort. Real names were for professional lives; if you had an online social life, you used a handle, preferably untraceable to your actual identity, to keep your anonymity and to ensure some measure of privacy when talking to people you hadn't ever met face to face. Posting under your full name was the sign of a naïf, hence the enduring popularity of the 1993 New Yorker cartoon captioned, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

Early networks like Friendster and MySpace, where users could create personal profiles, chiseled away some privacy paranoia. But one theory of why Friendster withered on the vine is that it lacked exactly what made Facebook so successful. Friendster didn’t understand that what makes a social network strong is its emphasis on social. As PC’s Peter Pachal writes in this insightful autopsy, Friendster died for a lack of what Facebook ended up pioneering: the news feed.

I remember first logging on to [Friendster], and seeing a big empty profile to fill in with photos, personal details, interests, and the like. But once I had a meaty profile (right down to my timely lamenting of the end of Buffy the Vampire Slayer), the next thing to do was… what, exactly? Sure, there were testimonials for friends, but after writing the half-dozen or so I actually wanted to write, it seemed that the only thing to do on Friendster was polish my profile.

When Zuckerberg launched Facebook’s news feed in 2006, it changed the game.

While the site was still attracting new people, he revamped it to elevate the news feed's importance, pushing apps and boxes to the rear and putting friends' updates, shares, and discussions front and center. Even the popular Facebook status update became more like a Twitter message, dropping the "so-and-so is eating bacon" format and losing its special prominence on profile pages.

Naturally, users freaked. But Zuckerberg stuck with his gut, and a funny thing happened. People got used to the new design. They started to miss their apps less and less. They started commenting on everything. And (most) stopped caring about how many friends they had. Along the way, Facebook got bigger than ever.

Facebook's popularity, then, made an account a standard tool for staying connected, and its real-name mandate made attaching your first and last name to your online social life the new standard. It’s way more difficult to pretend to be someone or something you’re not when your mom, your third grade best friend and the co-worker from two cubicles over are watching, so we became more and more comfortable being our full selves on Facebook. We gave up anonymity for the convenience of having pretty much everyone we knew, or ever did know, available to us on one social platform and findable by name, and now every day it seems we're finding out a new consequence for assuming that everyone involved plays by the same transparency rules.

In today's Senate hearing, Dick Durbin (D-IL) asked Zuckerberg if he'd be comfortable sharing which hotel he stayed in last night. "Um, no, I would not," said Zuck.

Durbin pressed on. "If you messaged anyone this week, would you share with us the names of the people you messaged?"

"Senator, no, I wouldn't choose to do that publicly here."

You and me both, Zuck. So where do we go from here?

Cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier, a fellow with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School, told the Harvard Gazette last August that individual actions we can take to safeguard our digital privacy have a relatively minor impact. "The best recommendation I have for people is to get involved in the political process. The best thing we can do as consumers and citizens is to make this a political issue. Force our legislators to change the rules," he said, because opting out of using digital tools entirely isn't an option:

And “buyer beware” is putting too much onus on the individual. People don’t test their food for pathogens or their airlines for safety. The government does it. But the government has failed in protecting consumers from internet companies and social media giants. But this will come around. The only effective way to control big corporations is through big government.

Zuckerberg has indicated that he'd be open to U.S. customers having access to European-style privacy tools, which could be a start. But it could be too little too late for many of his products — aka people — who are now reevaluating their Facebook use.

Zuckerberg deserves all of the backlash he's receiving of late, but it's not like his is the only site that knows our secrets. For all that Facebook remembers about my shopping and social habits — to say nothing of what my personal FBI agent, to whom I just waved, has seen — Google, the keeper of my search history and my personal email accounts, has the real goods. The thought of it is too great to bear some days, but what's the alternative? I'm pretty sure I can't just nuke 20 years of online life and start over as a dog.

On Equal Pay Day, how far have we come in 2018?

Shutterstock

Today is Equal Pay Day — the annual day that marks the large wage discrepancies that exist between men and women in the labor force.

Equal Pay Day was started by the National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE) in 1996 to point to the gap between men and women’s salaries. According to the organization, it is held every April to highlight how far into the year women need to work to earn what men did the year prior. Equal Pay Day is also always held on a Tuesday to “represent how far into the next work week women must work to earn what men earned the previous week." In other words, because women earn less on average than men do, they must work more to earn the same amount.

On Monday, the head of programming at HBO said the network has reviewed all of its shows and corrected gender pay gap disparities among staff, inspired by "Big Little Lies" star and producer Reese Witherspoon and the larger Time's Up movement, which the Academy Award winner helped spearhead.

“One of the things that’s come out of thinking about the movement and some conversations with Reese, who’s really at the forefront, is something we’ve done recently,” Casey Bloys, HBO’s president of programming, said to The Hollywood Reporter. “We’ve proactively gone through all of our shows. In fact, we just finished our process where we went through and made sure that there were no inappropriate disparities in pay. And where there were – if we found any – we corrected it going forward."

Despite some signs of improvement, at the current rate of progress, the wage gap will not be closed for another 217 years, according to economists.

Here are several stories about the wage inequality that Salon has already covered this year. They shine a light on how pervasive the problem is across industries, including the entertainment, finance and technology sectors.

Jan. 4: Women are surpassing their male peers in college graduation rates — but college alone isn’t closing the gender wage gap.

Jan. 19: At a #TimesUp meeting, it is revealed that "Black-ish" star Tracee Ellis Ross is paid "significantly less" than her co-star Anthony Anderson.

Jan. 25: The fight to close the pay gap in Hollywood is not just about pay equity between men and women — it’s also about ensuring that women of color get compensated equally to their white women co-stars. Actress Jessica Chastain helped Octavia Spencer get equal pay — and it was great, but sadly necessary.

Feb. 2: Comedian and actor Mo'Nique comes forward with a screenshot of what she alleges is the contract Netflix offered her for a comedy special — and it cast the company in the worst of lights.

Mar. 13: Producers of "The Crown” admit that Claire Foy, the star of the Netflix historic drama and winner of a Golden Globe for her spot-on and humanizing portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II, was paid less than her co-star Matt Smith, who plays Prince Philip.

Mar. 16: Female employees at Goldman Sachs make 56% less than men on average. It’s one of the steepest pay gaps recorded.

Mar. 26: A study finds that employers would rather hire women who got B’s over those who got A’s, and that male and female job candidates were evaluated very differently.

Apr. 4: Apple acknowledges that male employees earned 5% more on average than women at the company's U.K. operations.

The above stories do not include every example of gender inequality – and are only meant to highlight that the wage gap persists, despite claims from skeptics like Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who concluded that it is a myth.

In rare bipartian show, senators unite to roast Zuckerberg

AP/Andrew Harnik

Today’s Senate hearing on Capitol Hill was historic for many reasons, one being that the public got a unique opportunity to observe a highly-divided Senate band together to criticize CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his social media empire, Facebook — which has ironically been blamed for increasing partisanship and balkanizing the country.

An estimated 44 senators gathered together in a joint session before two Senate panels, the Commerce and Judiciary committees, a rare show for Congress. Their primary topic of discussion was the effects of data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica pilfering the personal data from 87 million Facebook users — yet each Senator had their own agenda when it came time to fling questions at Zuckerberg.

Together, Republican and Democratic Senators demanded details on how Facebook collects its users' data, and improvements on how to prevent it from happening again in the future.

"I’m not convinced that Facebook’s users have the information they need to make meaningful choices," Senate Commerce Chairman John Thune, R-S.D, said. "In the past, many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle have been willing to defer to tech companies’ efforts to regulate themselves. But this may be changing."

“If Facebook and other online companies will not or cannot fix these privacy invasions, then we will,” Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., warned.

From Kamala Harris to Orrin Hatch, each senator had their five minutes to grill Zuckerberg on Tuesday.

Here are some of the more memorable moments from today's five-hour hearing:

Zuckerberg apologizes multiple times

First and foremost, Zuckerberg repeatedly apologized for the scandal that led him to testifying in front of Congress in the first place. Zuckerberg's opening remarks were boilerplate: “Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company and for most of our existence we focused on all of the good that connecting people can do,” he told a joint hearing of the Senate Commerce and Judiciary committees. "But it's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well."

Zuckerberg would continue to apologize and take responsibility for the mess, but this seemed to only further incense the pack of Senators, who— in their own words — were looking for solutions, not apologies.

Zuckerberg kind of admits Facebook is a monopoly

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., asked Zuckerberg:“Who’s your biggest competitor?” Zuckerberg couldn’t provide him with a direct answer, and instead began to explain that Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft are “overlapping” with Facebook.

Graham interrupted.

“I’m not talking about categories. I’m talking about real competition you face. ‘Cause car companies face a lot of competition. They make a defective car, it gets out in the world, people stop buying that car, they buy another one. Is there an alternative to Facebook in the private sector?”

Zuckerberg says: “There will always be a free version of Facebook”

In an eyebrow-raising moment, Zuckerberg assured Senators that there will always be a “free” version of Facebook. This happened during Senator Orrin Hatch's (R-Utah) round of questioning.

“You said back then that Facebook would always be free,” Hatch said to Zuckerberg, referring to a 2010 meeting as part of the Senate Republican High Tech Task Force. “Is that still your objective?”

“Senator, yes,” Zuckerberg replied. “There will always be a version of Facebook that is free. It is our mission to try to help connect everyone around the world and bring the world closer together. In order to do that, we believe we need to deliver a service that everyone can afford.”

Some are speculating that a paid version of Facebook could be in the works.

Facebook didn’t initially report 2015 Cambridge Analytica data leak to FTC

During the hearing, it was revealed that Facebook didn’t notify the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) after learning about the Cambridge Analytica data leak in 2015. Instead, Facebook executives reportedly trusted that Cambridge Analytica had deleted the data as the company had requested.

"We considered it a closed case. In retrospect that was clearly a mistake. We shouldn't have taken their word for it," Zuckerberg said.

This is eyebrow-raising because Facebook signed a consent decree with the FTC in 2011 which said that Facebook would notify users is their data was shared beyond specified privacy settings.

Sen. Ted Cruz presses about alleged Facebook censorship  

Has Facebook censored conservative content on Facebook, like some have speculated? Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, used his moment with the mic to probe.

“There are a great many Americans who I think are deeply concerned that Facebook and other tech companies are engaged in a pervasive pattern of bias and political censorship,” Cruz said.

Cruz then asked if Facebook is a “neutral public forum?”

Zuckerberg said that Facebook is a platform for all ideas. Cruz asked Zuckerberg about the political ideologies of his employees, and asked why Palmer Lucky was fired; an employee who was alleged to have backed a pro-Donald Trump organization. Zuckerberg said he wasn’t fired because of his political beliefs.

Zuckerberg concluded that political biases in the company are a “fair concern,” but explained that Silicon Valley is traditionally left-leaning and progressive.

Sen. Kamala Harris gets tough

Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris of California started her questioning by saying she was “concerned.” Indeed, she gave Zuckerberg a tougher round of questioning than her predecessors. First, she recalled all of the questions she’s noted that Zuckerberg couldn’t answer, including not being able to name a competitor.

Harris then asked who made the decision in 2015 to not tell users that there had been a data breach.

“Did anyone at Facebook have a conversation at the time you became aware of this breach, a conversation where in which the decision was made not to contact the users?” Harris asked.

“In retrospect, that was a mistake,” Zuckerberg responded.

Harris then ran out of time.

Sen. John Kennedy says [TL;DR]: “Your user agreement sucks”

Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., used his few minutes to summarize what his fellow colleagues tried to tell Zuckerberg.

“Here is what everyone is trying to tell you today: ‘Your user agreement sucks,’” Kennedy said. “The purpose of the user agreement is to cover Facebook’s rear-end.”

Facebook has already tried to do this.

Sen. Chuck Grassley says Congress gets along better than the public may think

In his concluding remarks, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, rambled about media bias and called on Zuckerberg to help combat public cynicism for government.

“I hope that everyone will do whatever they can to help increase respect for government,” Grassley told Zuckerberg.

He also said that Congress gets along better than what the media depicts.

Tomorrow Zuckerberg will testify again — this time, before the House of Representatives.

Sinclair TV host resigns following vulgar tweet about David Hogg

Getty/Saul Loeb

Jamie Allman, a conservative commentator at a television station owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, resigned following a vulgar tweet that suggested he would sodomize 17-year-old Parkland shooting survivor, David Hogg, with a "hot poker."

The tweet came on March 26 and followed a string of verbal attacks directed towards Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students in the wake of their mobilization on the issue of gun reform after having suffered a tragic school shooting.

On March 26, Allman tweeted, "When we kick their ass they all like to claim we’re drunk. I’ve been hanging out getting ready to ram a hot poker up David Hogg’s ass tomorrow. Busy working. Preparing."

Allman was the host of a show on KDNL, an ABC affiliate in St. Louis, owned by Sinclair. A spokesperson for the company confirmed to TheWrap on Monday that Allman had been fired.

"Yes, his show is cancelled and he is off the air immediately," Ronn Torossian said.

"We have accepted Mr. Allman’s resignation, and his show has been canceled," Torossian also told the Washington Post.

Allman also hosts a separate morning FM radio show "Allman in the Morning," which he has not been removed from, though he has lost advertisers, TheWrap noted. However, on Tuesday he was absent from his show, and a fill-in host said, "Jamie’s taking a couple of days off," the Post noted.

Sinclair has come under fire for its far-right content that favors President Donald Trump, as well as a recent viral video in which news anchors across the country all read from the same Orwellian script.

The tweet by Allman also came just two days prior to Fox News host Laura Ingraham's criticism of Hogg. Ingraham lost advertisers as well, even as she returned to her show from vacation on Monday night. But instead of apologizing on-air, she doubled down and labeled the boycott of her show as a leftist attack on free speech and claimed that it was "Stalinist, pure and simple."

It all comes at a time when the Parkland shooting survivors have taken the country by storm in hopes to create positive change, and reduce gun violence. Conservatives have instead played victim, as they've bullied and dismissed the teenage students' efforts.

 

 

The perfect parental dread of “A Quiet Place”

Paramount Pictures

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD FOR "A QUIET PLACE"

When I was pregnant with my first child, a neighbor with three kids of his own offered me the most reassuring and terrifying wisdom I've ever heard on the subject of parenting. "You worry so much about them," he said. "You worry about what's going to happen when they're out of your sight. But honestly, all the worst things have happened right in front of my eyes, when I was a few feet away." Eighteen years later, it's why I can't get "A Quiet Place" out of my head.

Director and co-writer John Krasinski's sleeper horror hit takes place on a near future earth that has been invaded by hostile aliens who hunt their human (and raccoon) prey via sound. Most of the population has perished, but the Abbott family — parents Lee (Krasinski) and Evelyn (Emily Blunt), their deaf daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds) and sons Marcus and Beau have managed to survive, relying on sign language and improvised soundproofing. In the first few minutes of the film, the family goes into their abandoned town for supplies, and Beau becomes enamored of a mechanical rocket. A few minutes later, en route home, the toy begins whizzing and the child is snatched by a creature, as his horrified family watches helplessly.

The rest of the film unfolds a year later, as the Abbots continue to eke out their existence in the aftermath of grief and the anticipation of Evelyn's new baby. The emotional power of "A Quiet Place" rests in how it gives each character scenes that depict the aftermath of tragedy, and the psychic toll of ongoing stress. Regan has made a makeshift memorial to her brother on the spot where he was taken; Beau is afraid to leave the property; Lee claims not to blame his daughter for her part in Beau's death, but his distance from her comes through nonetheless. And Evelyn, methodically preparing for another child while sobbing silently for the one she's lost, is a jumble of strength and self-recrimination.

"I could have carried him," she tells Lee late in the film. She's running through the scene again in her head, chiding herself because her hands were free when they were walking home that day. If only he'd been in her arms, he'd have been safe, she thinks. Lee reassures her it's not her fault, but Evelyn is exhausted and broken. "Who are we," she asks, "if we can't protect them?" She then makes him vow he will always protect them — a vow they've both clearly been making good on with every act of their waking lives.

The film's wide appeal certainly owes a large debt to its popcorn consumption inhibiting use of silence, punctuated with meticulously deployed morsels of sound. But it's also impossible to imagine "A Quiet Place" being nearly as effective without the considerable credibility of real-life husband and wife — and parents of two — and Krasinski and Blunt.

Not all real-life couples have on-screen chemistry, but the film's leads never stop looking at each other with a completely believable "I would be killed by a giant bug with a thousand teeth for you" energy. Whether sharing a consoling dance and pair of ear buds or confronting the excruciating possibility of losing one another, they're bound up in their pain, their failures and their determination.

But the film's greatest kick in the gut is that like other claustrophobic horrors including "The Ring" and "Don't Breathe," the terror is ratcheted up by a narrow imperative. Can you figure out the rules, and play by them to live? It's a device as old as the tale of Medusa, and it works because it feeds our primal fear that our catastrophes are our own mistakes, and our survival is a testament to our ingenuity. It's a brain game that magnifies exponentially when you become a parent. Because who are we, if we can't protect them?

The instinct for self-preservation suddenly seems laughably insignificant the day you meet your instinct to keep your kids safe. Any halfway decent parent surrenders a significant portion of their brain power and physical energy toward doing their best for their kids from the moment that stick gets peed on. We put them on their backs to sleep when they're infants. Move the cleaning supplies to a high cabinet. Take them to the doctor when they're sick. Volunteer at their schools. Hold them close when they cry. Check in on them when they're out with their friends. Don't let them play with toy rockets that will get them eaten. It seems like a tidy deal with the universe. And yet and yet and yet. They tumble off the swings. They get fevers that terrify us. They get mental health issues that terrify us. They get bullied by classmates. We want to believe that if we just do everything right, the wheels will never fall off. Wheels sometimes fall off anyway.

Speaking with The Daily Californian this week, Krasinski acknowledged the film's family-centric sense of dread. "We just had our second daughter about three weeks before I read the script," he said. "And so I was already in the state of terror of keeping this girl safe  . . . and whether or not I was a good enough father. [And then] in comes this script about a family that relies on each other, about parents that would do absolutely anything for their kids. So it doesn’t take a lot for me to cry, but I was wide open for this one, and it connected to me in a big way."

I have replayed the scenes my children's scariest moments over and over in my mind thousands of times. It's not difficult, because just as my neighbor predicted so long ago, most of them happened right in front of me. I try to rewrite the falls and the illnesses and the outbursts, so that this time I do something differently and the disasters are averted. Then I remember how things really happened, and I feel all that sadness all over again, weighted with all that guilt. By the way, I'm a really good mom. I know that. My kids know that. But whether I'm standing there next to them or not, they still get hurt.

Near the end of "A Quiet Place," Lee does protect his children, by sacrificing his own life. But both he and Evelyn have already also protected them in the most significant ways possible. In a shattered world, they've still given them math lessons and board games. They've taught them how to scavenge for medicine and fish for dinner. They've loved them and encouraged them. They've given them — as Evelyn learns in the nick of time — the ingenuity to fight off the monsters, the ability to interpret the thing that makes them vulnerable as the thing that gives them strength. And if the horror story of parenting is learning the myriad the ways we can't protect them, the joy of it is in discovering, one day, that they've become pretty great at taking care of themselves.

Facebook fails again: “Black Lives Matter” page with huge following was a scam

AP/Lynne Sladky

A fake Facebook page posing as part of Black Lives Matter – and with a following two times the size of the movement's verified Facebook account – ran for at least a year and has been linked to a white man in Australia, according to CNN. The page, titled "Black Lives Matter," reportedly solicited money through online fundraisers, claiming the donations would support associated causes.

However, CNN has revealed that the page raised at least $100,000 – and at least a portion of that money was transferred to Australian bank accounts. With nearly 700,000 followers,"Black Lives Matter" had fundraising campaigns with PayPal, Patreon, Donorbox and Classy. Only after CNN contacted PayPal and Patreon for comment did they suspend the campaigns. (Donorbox and Classy had previously taken action.)

Tuesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before Congress in the wake of revelations that the personal and private data of more than 80 million users was harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a British consulting firm with ties to the 2016 Trump campaign. The data breach was the tipping point, and the fake "Black Lives Matter" page only adds to the mounting list of controversies surrounding a company that has come under consistent fire for failing to curb rampant fake news and foreign interference in electoral politics.

The integrity of Facebook and the validity of much of its content continues to raise questions about misinformation and transparency. When CNN approached Facebook about its findings regarding the sham "Black Lives Matter" page, the social media juggernaut responded that the page did not violate its "Community Standards," even though it had raised money under false pretenses as it profited from the death and oppression of black people.

Only after more than a week of repeated emails did Facebook finally suspend the page (although it was a byproduct of the suspension of the user account of the page's administrator), CNN reported. Arguably more disturbing is the fact that Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors tweeted that the movement had contacted Facebook about the fraudulence of the page months earlier.

"These fake BLM accounts and fake BLM people literally stealing money off of black death is so stomach churning I can’t even begin to explain," she wrote. "We told Facebook over and over again to shut that sh*t down. And it wouldn’t. Glad it’s down now."

These fake BLM accounts and fake BLM people literally stealing money off of Black Death is so stomach churning I can’t even begin to explain. We told fb over and over again to shut that shit down. And it wouldn’t. Glad it’s down now.

— patrisse cullors (@OsopePatrisse) April 10, 2018

Cullors added that the movement's founders also had to demand that Twitter remove a fake Black Lives Matter account last month. "We deal with the co-option of our work locally, nationally and globally. It is important that platforms like Facebook and Twitter do their due diligence so supporters aren’t misled and resources aren’t misappropriated," the movement's verified account tweeted.

We deal with the co-option of our work locally, nationally, and globally.

It is important that platforms like @facebook and @Twitter do their due diligence so supporters aren’t misled and resources aren’t misappropriated. https://t.co/UhIELvFnbF

— Black Lives Matter (@Blklivesmatter) April 10, 2018

These missteps are becoming routine for Facebook. As CNN reported, "Not for the first time, Facebook took action against a major bad actor on its site not on its own, but because journalists made inquiries." And racial justice causes and groups have been particularly susceptible to Facebook's inaction and lax security measures. In Sept. 2017, a CNN investigation revealed a social media campaign linked to the Russian government called "Blactivist" on Facebook and Twitter. The campaign exploited racial injustices including mass incarceration and police killings to amplify political and racial tensions during the 2016 presidential election.

Black Lives Matter already faces numerous blockades to organizing. Activists in the movement have been wrongly labeled terrorists and surveilled by the FBI. The movement's objectives are constantly undercut by propaganda on the right, and even with all the momentum and national attention it has garnered around the perils of police violence, accused officers are rarely indicted or convicted for their alleged actions.

Now, organizers also have to police social media for perpetrators. Cullors told CNN that the investigation into the fake Facebook page shows its harm to the movement. "We rely on donors who believe in our work and our cause and that money will be used in a way that is respectful," she said.

The disturbing page was reportedly removed after CNN contacted one of the Australian men who is reportedly connected to it. "The page consistently linked to websites tied to Ian Mackay, a National Union of Workers official in Australia. The union represents thousands of workers across various industries," CNN reported. "A spokesperson for the National Union of Workers said Tuesday that it has suspended Mackay and one other official while it investigates the situation."

Mackay reportedly registered numerous websites tied to black rights, including in April 2015, blackpowerfist.com. The "Black Lives Matter" Facebook page drove traffic to that and other associated websites, among them blacklivesmatter.media, which in an internet-archived record, names Mackay as the administrative and technical contact.

When CNN asked Mackay about the Facebook page last month, he denied being behind it. And of a Black Lives Matter website registered by him, he said: "I once bought the domain name only and sold it." But within a few hours of the questioning, the Facebook page was deactivated, the outlet reported.

As early as Dec. 2017, journalist Jeremy Massler suspected that the "Black Lives Matter" Facebook page was a scam, and he claimed that whomever runs the page "is trying to make some money off the back of the Black Lives Matter movement."

"It's important to remember the movement was organic and no organizations started the protests that spread across the country," Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson told CNN. "The consequences of that is it hasn't been easy to think about authenticity in the digital space."

Tucker Carlson reports on “sex-crazed pandas,” ignores Michael Cohen news

Getty/Shutterstock/Salon

Here’s an existential question: If mainstream media depicts reality, and right-wing media depicts a parallel universe — one in which the patriarchy has been dismantled, the evil liberals are utterly victorious in the culture wars, and a panda’s sex drive is headline-worthy — which universe would you rather live in?

At least, the latter sounds more fun. So it seems either Fox News host Tucker Carlson is permanently stuck in an alternate reality, or he’s purposely trying to avoid reporting on President Donald Trump’s slow unraveling.

On Monday night, Carlson reported on what he or his masters at Fox believed to be one of the most important news stories of the day: Panda bears have sex. Oddly, the FBI raid on the office of Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, or U.S. military intervention in Syria, didn’t make the cut in the editorial meeting. But debunking fake news about panda bear sex did.

“You know the official story about pandas — they’re cute, they’re adorably helpless, which is why they’re almost extinct,” Tucker said. “But like a lot of what we hear, that’s a lie. According to today’s Wall Street Journal, quote, ‘The real panda is a secret stud, with a taste for flesh and a fearsome bite,’” Tucker said. “Pandas, it turns out, can easily kill you if they felt like it, thank god they don’t.”

Here’s the kicker: "They’re not against sex either, they just hate unsexy zoos, but when they’re in the wild male pandas engage in a fierce sexual contest. The winner has sex 40 times in a single afternoon.”

Carlson was inspired by a recent article in the Wall Street Journal titled, “The Un-Cuddly Truth About Pandas.”

The segment understandably caused a flurry of comments on Twitter, including some speculation on how pandas bears could be tied to Michael Cohen’s raid.

Maybe Trump was in a 3-way with a sex crazed Panda and Cohen had to pay them off... https://t.co/xsGQqCgVTn

— Lizz Winstead (@lizzwinstead) April 10, 2018

Uh-oh. That @TuckerCarlson segment on crazed panda sex is just going to rile him up further. https://t.co/k2NWbDy5Fs

— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) April 10, 2018

Fully anticipating the president to start tweeting criticisms of Michelle Obama for meeting with aggressive, sex-crazed pandas in China

— Charles Bergquist (@cbquist) April 10, 2018

https://twitter.com/kyliesparks/statu...

This is the proverbial cherry on top of Carlson's outrageous remarks on his show, "Tucker Carlson Tonight," as of late. Indeed, Carlson spent Women's History Month running a series of segments on his highly-rated prime time show denying that widespread sexism even exists. Typical of right-wing grievance culture's tendency to subvert reality, Carlson even declared, "the patriarchy is gone, women are winning, men are failing."

Unfortunately for Carlson, this news about panda bears wasn’t exactly new. In November 2017, Fivethirtyeight published a feature on a panda bear named Pan Pan who was “really good at sex." Now that was a story worth telling.

You can watch the clip here:

Americans should welcome the age of unexceptionalism

AP Photo/David Zalubowski

Exceptionalism — the idea that the United States has a mission and character that separates it from other nations — is ingrained in everyday talk about American politics.

It shapes high-level discussions about foreign policy — for example, in a recent argument by a foreign affairs scholar that the United States plays a “unique role as the world’s anchor of liberal ideas.”

It shapes conversation about domestic policy too. It leads us to think that America’s internal divisions and problems are distinctive — and by implication, that the experience of other countries cannot tell us much about how to handle them.

But is the United States really exceptional?

Every country is special

It is, at a basic level, of course. Every country believes that its circumstances are distinctive. Russians talk about their “specialness.” The Chinese insist on their “uniqueness.” Indians have long noted the unusual complexity of their politics.

Beyond this, though, the idea of American exceptionalism does not hold up. My research suggests that it is also obstructing the country’s ability to think clearly about the challenges ahead.

Exceptionalism has two aspects. One is the notion that the United States, since its founding, has had a distinct ambition — a “messianic mission” to promote liberty and democracy.

By itself, having a national mission is not unusual. The European empires of the 19th century were also driven by grand ambitions. The French talked about their mission to civilize the world. The British promoted “British ideals” such as liberty and the rule of law. They even promised eventual self-government for colonies — when London judged that the colonies were ready for it.

The American practice was not entirely different. The country’s leaders declared their mission to civilize the continent. They acquired territory, often by force, and then decided whether people were ready to govern themselves. The empowerment of African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, native peoples and immigrants was delayed because they were considered by the white Anglo-Saxon majority to be “ill-fitted for self-rule.”

And the United States was also a colonizing power. For example, it occupied the Philippines in the first half of the 20th century, sought to introduce “American civilization” and again deferred self-rule because Filipinos were judged not to be ready for it.

In the 20th century, politicians in the United States and Europe were pushed toward a more enlightened view of freedom. Faced with protests and rebellions, Western countries gave up most of their colonies and enfranchised more of their people. And they adopted codes like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights.

Freedom and democracy, a shared goal

Again, though, the United States was not exceptional in its pursuit of freedom and democracy. There was a shared commitment to human rights, even though countries often fell short of the ideal in practice.

The second aspect of exceptionalism has to do with the character of American society and politics. The claim is that governing in the United States is different than in Europe because the U.S. population is so diverse, people are so wedded to their rights, and central government has been historically weak. After all, the United States was born in revolution. And it empowered the people before modern conditions required strong government.

This claim does not get the scrutiny it deserves. Sometimes it relies on a stereotype of centralized government in Europe. It overlooks Europe’s long history of uprisings, civil wars, coups and partitions. Deep ambivalence about authority is certainly not peculiar to the United States.

Moreover, western Europe accounts for a small minority of the world’s 195 states. Almost half of those states are fewer than 80 years old. Most are categorized as fragile. Leaders in fragile states struggle to establish central authority and manage deep internal divisions, while respecting domestic and international law on human rights.

In short, they wrestle with all of the challenges that are said to make the United States exceptional.

Need to recognize commonalities

This wrongheaded emphasis on exceptionalism is unfortunate for two reasons.

The first is that it complicates the task of building a global coalition to defend freedom and democracy. Recent history shows the urgent need for such a coalition. Around the world, democracy is perceived to be in retreat. China, a one-party state, will soon have the world’s biggest economy. In the fight to advance human rights, the United States needs all the friends it can get. Rhetoric about U.S. exceptionalism does not help to build alliances.

It also undermines the country’s capacity to deal with one of the most challenging aspects of democratic governance. This is the problem of managing sharp internal divisions without resorting to methods that crush liberties and respect for minorities.

As any history book will show, the United States has much experience with this problem. But so do many other countries. Some, like India, the world’s most populous liberal democracy, deal with it on a much larger scale. There is an opportunity to learn across borders. Rhetoric about exceptionalism makes it less likely that this will happen.

In this century, the pursuit of traditional American ideals requires new ways of thinking. The ambition to advance freedom and democracy is now broadly shared. So is experience in translating these ideals into practice. To defend those ideals, all of the world’s democracies must pull together in a common cause.

The first step is adopting a new point of view. Call it unexceptionalism: an attitude that acknowledges the commonalities, as well as the differences, in the American experience.

Alasdair S. Roberts, Director, School of Public Policy, University of Massachusetts Amherst