The Clubhouse app is open to guests only, but opens slowly

Photographer: Christoph Dernbach / photo alliance / Images

When Clubhouse, a private social app, debuted in March last year, it was difficult for most people to enter an invitation. During the summer, the limited release fueled intrigue and discussion, especially as big names in music, entertainment and technology created accounts. Even Oprah showed up. In the app, users hosted informal, unobtrusive conversations in which they talked to hundreds of listeners – such as a large but more fun conference call.

To join the Clubhouse, people had to be invited by existing members. AThe application reached thousands of users in the summer, a group still seemed to be missing: journalists.

A Clubhouse spokeswoman said the company never excluded journalists, however many users have said that the rules of the service – and its name – have created a culture of exclusivity and secrecy. For the most part, people found out about highly controversial or heated conversations after users shared audio clips from Clubhouse cameras on Twitter and elsewhere. But Clubhouse’s terms of service were clear: sharing what happened at Clubhouse outside of Clubhouse was against the rules.

It was an intimate feeling of intimacy that led to fun and whimsical moments in the app, such as swing song sessions or a leu rege reconstitution. But this feeling also encouraged darker conversations, which got involved homophobia or took anti-Semitic rounds.

These two opposing dynamics – bringing people together, but also driving them away – have been amplified in recent months as Clubhouse growth has exploded. Its founders said on Sunday that the app had 2 million users, a huge increase from just a few months earlier. This week, investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, valued the service for less than a year at $ 1 billion. The startup raised $ 100 million in the round, according to him the Axios.

Meanwhile, he hosted hot-topic conversations with news producers: The San Francisco District Attorney joined a heated discussion on urban crime earlier this month. And a few days later, the mayors of Miami, San Francisco and Austin, Texas, all attended a digital Clubhouse panel to talk about their cities – and to present them as candidates for technological pandemic relocations – to thousands of listeners.

None of these events were open to the public. But they weren’t exactly private either. In recent months, as the Clubhouse profile has grown, more reporters and editors have found their way into the app. Some of them reported the increasingly important discussions on the platform – as well as the young company’s controversies regarding harassment and moderation of content.

The journalists did not arrive at the Clubhouse accidentally. Many of them marked their coveted invitation from a specific Clubhouse user, Sarah Szalavitz, a research and development consultant and former entertainment lawyer. Since October, Szalavitz has made it his personal mission to invite as many reporters as possible to the Clubhouse. It is part of her quest to bring transparency to the application, which she believes is designed in a way that encourages hate speech and radicalization without enough moderation to mitigate it.

So far, Szalavitz said, she and her friends have brought several hundred journalists to the Clubhouse, who in turn have helped enroll hundreds more. Earlier this year, she estimated that at least 1,800 joined the application, up from about 275 by number in October.

Szalavitz, who spent his time teaching social design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, said he saw that Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. they tend to punish bad actors “with enough attention from the media.” Her thinking at the Clubhouse was simple: “The way to make changes was to draw the public’s attention to them,” she said.

At first, Szalavitz had resisted joining the Clubhouse. She had read that New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz, who had written about the company in May and was one of the few reporters on the platform, was harassed in the app after the VCs complained about critical news coverage. But as the pandemic continued, Szalavitz and her fiancé Sonaar Luthra began to feel more alone at their Los Angeles home. Their friends joined the Clubhouse. So, in the fall, they tried.

Immediately, Szalavitz said, she felt more connected to her friends and had conversations with people in her extended network. Hearing someone’s voice without seeing their face was more fun and less awkward than a meeting with Zoom. She and Luthra began hosting daily rooms in the Clubhouse for telephone banking for then-US presidential candidate Joe Biden – people could ask questions and ask questions about how to get involved or share their experiences.

But Szalavitz also noticed that the app seemed designed to limit the spread of conversations outside its digital walls. Unlike Twitter or Facebook, the application leaves no record of what was said. Clubhouse’s terms of service prohibit recording the sound of a room, unless everyone there agrees – almost impossible with chats that can accommodate thousands of people. And in order to receive invitations to give to friends, users need to share their contact list with the company, which many journalists, careful to expose their sources, will not do. “This is a platform that was designed to evade liability,” Szalavitz said.

As he spent more time in the app, he saw that some divisive figures were active on the Clubhouse, such as Curtis Yarvin, a blogger whose ideas inspired right-wing leaders. And she was frustrated when the company did not take decisive action after she and others expressed concerns about moderation during the Clubhouse’s virtual “town halls” with its founders.

A Clubhouse spokeswoman said racism, hate speech and abuse are prohibited in the application and that moderation has always been a top priority. She cited moderation features, including blocking certain users and the ability to signal rooms for further investigation.

At first, Szalavitz was willing to wait and see what policies the Clubhouse team could add on their own. But her attitude changed after Yom Kippur, just weeks after she joined the app. That day, he hosted an all-day chat room about atonement. Later that night, another discussion room called “Anti-Semitism and Black Culture” appeared, in which speakers trafficked in anti-Semitic troops. Jewish listeners pointed out that some of the speakers’ statements were extremely painful, given that the conversation took place on the holiest day of the year. Bloomberg News and other stores reported the details of the conversation, but Szalavitz knew he could have passed easily without being publicly discussed. He thought the app needed more responsibility and felt he couldn’t rely on it coming from Clubhouse itself.