Since its introduction last year, the Clubhouse app, for invitations only, has gotten a big bang. Social media has been around long enough for everything old to be new again, and unlike other apps that encourage users to share links or fragmented thoughts in exchange for “likes,” Clubhouse facilitates voice conversations via the phone. Basically, you can choose a topic and organize your own discussion with friends. If you’re lucky, you can join a conversation and share your thoughts with people like Elon Musk or any of the famous and influential users of the site.
However, I am sorry to inform you that a growing number of journalists are deeply concerned about the growing popularity of the Clubhouse. Because? It looks like Clubhouse won’t be accommodating his inner Big Brother.
In GritDaily, an online publication that is proposed as “the leading source of news about the Millennial and Gen Z brands – fashion, technology, influencers, entrepreneurship and life,” staff writer Olivia Smith pointed to the new app in a story of late January. His main complaint was that he felt “an alarming amount of casual sexism.” However, readers should trust his word, which was the point of his critique, and the point, in a way, of the application itself.
“At the clubhouse” Smith wrote, “No screenshots. There’s no way to drag old Clubhouse posts years later, as a Twitter user might do. There is no way to record conversations, that is, there is no way to prove that someone is saying anything controversial. There is no path to accountability. Clubhouse users know, or at least believe, that they can speak openly about their opinion with zero repercussions. “
Smith also claimed that in a conversation she overheard, “a moderator was actively spreading misinformation” about the COVID vaccine and that an African female doctor who objected was “intimidated” to leave the conversation.
This article led to a follow-up on the website of the Poynter Institute (the journalistic foundation launched by PolitiFact) of a prominent Poynter editor. On Feb. 11, the topic was titled “A Land Checking at the Clubhouse,” Cristina Tardáguila of Poynter aptly cited Olivia Smith’s concerns about the lack of a written record at the Clubhouse and added not one of its own. “The lack of these characteristics will surely produce barriers for the verifiers of facts. Not only will it be difficult to choose which club to join, but it also requires verifiers to listen to hours and hours of conversations before selecting which claims to evaluate.
This attitude is discordant for those who are old enough to remember when unrecorded conversations about culture and politics were normal, and even less preferable to the infernal landscape of social media we have today. Increasingly, the “path to accountability” of social media is to fire random people from their jobs and turn them into national objects of contempt for a single untimely or misinterpreted observation that may not be representative of a lifelong behavior. Those who pursue this path to social justice seem unaware of the most creepy aspect of their behavior: they unconsciously emulate the behavior of tyrants and totalitarian regimes everywhere. Or, sometimes, doing it consciously: here is Cristina Tardáguila’s button Poynter’s piece: “With countless other platforms, data verifiers are forced to fight, would it be better to ignore Clubhouse for now? … After a rare moment of cross-border dialogue between users in mainland China and others countries, Chinese censors were installed. If the Xi Jinping administration does not ignore Clubhouse, why should they check the facts? Why should you do it? “
New York Times technical journalist Taylor Lorenz also put Clubhouse in her sights, with instructive results.
Earlier this month, Lorenz jumped on Twitter and accused risky capitalist Marc Andreessen of using the word “retarded” in Clubhouse in a pejorative way and lamented that “no one else called him.” As it turned out, Andreessen was not the speaker who used that word and was not used as an “insult,” as Lorenz claimed. It emerged in reference to a name that had been given to the online community “Wall Street Bets” (recently published in the stock market news).
Once upon a time, such an irresponsible accusation would save the journalist a time in the penalty box. Instead, Lorenz had the opportunity to co-author a highly critical Times work with the app, noting that he “faces issues of harassment, misinformation, and privacy.” All of this may be true, however, in what makes Clubhouse different, for example, from Facebook or Twitter, which journalists happily use on a daily basis?
And it was journalists who headed the charge to get the right-wing social rights app, Parler, degraded after the U.S. Capitol uprising last month, despite the cargo documents and other Subsequent evidence shows that the vast majority of insurrection planning was done on Facebook. Perhaps one of the reasons there hasn’t been any serious move to degrade Facebook is that Mark Zuckerberg’s giant provides a lot of revenue to posts that pay the salaries of our perpetually censored journalists. These are the types of conflicts of interest that journalists in a more benign economic environment have felt free to explore.
Instead, it seems that the real problem with Clubhouse is that it allows people to have real conversations. The New York Times’ official announcement of the Twitter account Lorenz’s story noting that “free conversations are taking place at Clubhouse, an invitation-only app that allows you to meet in audio chat rooms … despite being concerned about harassment, misinformation and privacy “. While the Times probably didn’t use “unrestricted” in a literal sense — after seeing journalists praise Xi Jinping’s approach to free speech, it’s hard to say — it’s revealing that the strings are strings. which are used to prevent people from escaping.
If the message is the medium, Clubhouse at least tries to take advantage of a certain measure of humanity by encouraging real person-to-person dialogue. This should not be assumed to be threatening. Yes, it is true that spontaneous and not moderate human interaction can have bad results, but for the same reason, meaningful conversations are also powerful enough to change your mind and touch your heart. Good luck doing so with the 280 character limit on Twitter.
Instead of running to try to boot badly, do you think like a gang of Orwellian truffle pigs, journalists from places like Poynter and The New York Times have posed how they can use their own platforms to gather people? Promoting a real commitment in a deeply politicized and polarized country where we could all make one more effort to see the humanity of those who disagree?
In the end, it is easier to generate consensus around true and unifying messages than to reduce all marginal voices that may be wrong. The default message that an uncontrolled conversation between reasonable people is a threat will only lead those who spread really harmful ideas to dark, encrypted corners of the Internet.
It’s best to remain skeptical about social media and all its forms, but for now, what’s happening at the still nascent Clubhouse is lowering the bar to be more promising than other social media platforms. Elon Musk recently asked Vladimir Putin to hold a conversation with him at the Clubhouse and the Kremlin says this request is being studied. There’s always the possibility that this conversation will end badly, but if you’re worried about social media hostilities, World War III is much more likely to start on Twitter and be planned on Facebook.