The Clubhouse app is for invitations only, but opens slowly

Photographer: Christoph Dernbach / picture alliance / Images

When Clubhouse, a private social app, debuted in March last year, it was hard for most people to get an invitation. During the summer, its limited release fueled intrigue and chatter, especially when the big names in music, entertainment, and technology created accounts. Even Oprah made an appearance. In the app, users organized informal off-the-shelf conversations where they talked to hundreds of listeners, like a big but more fun phone conference.

To join Clubhouse, existing members needed the invitation of people. As the app reached thousands of users in the summer, it seemed that a group was still missing: the journalists.

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

It was a huge sense of privacy that sparked fun and whimsical moments in the app, such as crib sessions or Lion king recreation. But that feeling also fostered darker conversations that have involved homophobia or made anti-Semitic turns.

These two opposing dynamics: bringing people together, but also separating them, have amplified in recent months as the growth of the Clubhouse had exploded. Its founders said Sunday that the app had 2 million users, a huge growth from a few months ago. This week, investors like Andreessen Horowitz have valued the service that it still didn’t have a year at $ 1 billion. According to the start-up, it raised $ 100 million in the round to Axios.

Meanwhile, he has hosted thematic conversations with reporters: the San Francisco district attorney joined a heated talk on urban crime earlier this month. A few days later, the mayors of Miami, San Francisco and Austin, Texas, participated in a digital panel of the Clubhouse to talk about their cities and present them as candidates for technical pandemic transfers to thousands of listeners gathered .

None of these events were open to the public. But they weren’t exactly private either. In recent months, as the profile of the Clubhouse has grown, there have been more journalists and editors in the app. Some of them have explained the increasingly interesting discussions on the platform, as well as the young company’s controversies about harassment and moderation of content.

Journalists did not arrive at the Clubhouse by chance. Many of them got the coveted invitation from a specific Clubhouse user, Sarah Szalavitz, a research and development consultant and former entertainment lawyer. Since October, Szalavitz has become a personal mission to invite as many reporters as possible to the Clubhouse. It is part of his quest to bring transparency to the app, which he believes is designed in a way that encourages hate speech and radicalization without sufficient moderation to mitigate it.

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

Szalavitz, who also spent time teaching social design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, said he had seen Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. they tended to punish bad actors “with enough media attention.” His thinking about Clubhouse was simple: “The way to make changes was to get the public’s attention,” he said.

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

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

But Szalavitz also realized that the app seemed designed to limit the spread of conversations outside its digital walls. Unlike Twitter or Facebook, the app leaves no record of what is being said. Clubhouse service terms prohibit recording audio from a room unless everyone agrees, almost impossible with chat rooms that can hold thousands of people. And in order to get invitations to give to friends, users have to share their contact list with the company, which many journalists, wary of exposing their sources, will not do. “This is a platform designed to evade accountability,” Szalavitz said.

As he spent more time on the app, he saw some divisive figures active at Clubhouse, such as Curtis Yarvin, a blogger whose ideas have inspired high-right leaders. And she was frustrated when the company failed to take decisive action after she and others voiced their 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 priority. He cited moderation features that include blocking specific users and the ability to mark rooms for further research.

At first, Szalavitz was willing to wait to see what policies the Clubhouse team could add on their own. But his attitude changed after Yom Kippur, a few weeks after he joined the app. That day, he organized an all-day chat room about atonement. Later that night, another discussion room called “Anti-Semitism and Black Culture” emerged, in which speakers traded in anti-Semitic troops. Jewish listeners noted that some of the speakers ’statements were very painful as the conversation took place on the holiest day of the year. Bloomberg News and other outlets reported on the details of the conversation, but Szalavitz knew it could easily happen without being publicly discussed. He believed the app needed more accountability and felt he couldn’t count on it coming from the Clubhouse itself.