Clubhouse app is by invitation only but opening slowly

Photographer: Christoph Dernbach / picture alliance / Images

When Clubhouse, a personal social app, debuted in March last year, it was hard for most people to score an invite. During the summer, its limited rollout sparked intrigue and chatter, especially as big names in music, entertainment and technology created accounts. Even Oprah appeared. On the app, users had casual, casual conversations where they could talk to hundreds of listeners – like a large conference call, but more fun.

To join Clubhouse, people had to be invited by existing members. As the app reached thousands of users in the summera group seemed to be largely missing: journalists.

A clubhouse spokeswoman said the company has never ruled out journalists, however Many users said the rules – and the 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 of clubhouse rooms on Twitter and elsewhere. But Clubhouse’s terms of service made it clear: Sharing what was happening at Clubhouse outside of Clubhouse was against the rules.

It was a cozy sense of privacy that led to fun and whimsical moments in the app, like lullabies or a Lion King reenactment. But that feeling has also fueled dark conversations homophobia or took anti-Semitic turns.

Those two opposing dynamics – bringing people together, but also driving them apart – have intensified in recent months as Clubhouse’s growth boomed. The founders said on Sunday that the app had 2 million users, a huge growth from a few months earlier. This week, investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, valued the less than a year old service at $ 1 billion. The startup raised $ 100 million according to the round to Axios.

Meanwhile, it has hosted high-profile conversations with news makers: the San Francisco district attorney joined a heated conversation about urban crime earlier this month. And a few days later, the mayors of Miami, San Francisco and Austin, Texas all took part in a digital clubhouse panel to narrate their cities – and pitch them as techie relocation candidates – in front of thousands of gathered listeners.

None of these events were open to the public. But they weren’t exactly private either. As Clubhouse’s profile has grown in recent months, more reporters and editors have made their way to the app. Some of them have chronicled the increasingly important discussions on the platform, as well as the fledgling company’s controversies over harassment and content moderation.

The journalists did not accidentally arrive at Clubhouse. Many of them scored their coveted invitation from a specific clubhouse user, Sarah Szalavitz, a research and development consultant and former entertainment attorney. Since October, Szalavitz has made it a personal mission to invite as many reporters as possible to Clubhouse. It’s part of her quest to bring transparency to the app, which she says is designed to promote hate speech and radicalization without enough measure to mitigate it.

So far, Szalavitz said, she and her friends have brought hundreds of journalists to Clubhouse, who in turn have helped write hundreds more. At the beginning of this year, she estimated that at least 1,800 joined the app in October, up from 275, according to her count.

Szalavitz, who also spent time teaching social design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, said she had seen Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. tended to punish bad actors “with adequate media attention.” Her thought about Clubhouse was simple: “The way to make changes was to draw public attention to it,” she said.

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

Szalavitz immediately said she felt more connected to her friends and was also recording conversations with people in her extensive network. Hearing someone’s voice without seeing their face was more fun and less clumsy than a Zoom meeting. She and Luthra began hosting daily rooms at Clubhouse for people who banked by phone for then-US presidential candidate Joe Biden – people could stop by 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 beyond the digital walls. Unlike Twitter or Facebook, the app leaves no record of what is being said. Clubhouse’s terms of service prohibit recording a room’s audio unless everyone agrees – nearly impossible with chat rooms that can accommodate thousands of people. And to get friends invitations, users have to share their contact list with the company, something many journalists who don’t want to divulge their sources won’t. “This is a platform designed to bypass accountability,” said Szalavitz.

As she spent more time on the app, she saw a number of divisive figures active in Clubhouse, such as Curtis Yarvin, a blogger whose ideas have inspired alt-right leaders. And she was frustrated when the company failed to take decisive action after she and others raised concerns about moderation during Clubhouse’s virtual “town halls” with the founders.

A clubhouse spokeswoman said racism, hate speech and abuse are banned from the app, and moderation has always been a top priority. She mentioned moderation features, including blocking specific users and the ability to mark rooms for further investigation.

Initially, Szalavitz was willing to wait to see what policies the Clubhouse team itself could add. But her attitude changed after Yom Kippur, just a few weeks after logging into the app. That day she hosted a chat room about reconciliation all day long. Later that evening, another discussion room called ‘Anti-Semitism and Black Culture’ emerged, in which the speakers acted in anti-Semitic tropes. Jewish listeners pointed out that some of the speakers’ claims were especially 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 have easily slipped by without being discussed publicly. She believed the app needed more accountability, and she felt she couldn’t count on it coming from Clubhouse itself.