Clubhouse app is by invitation only but slowly open

Photographer: Christoph Dernbach / picture alliance / Images

When Clubhouse, a private social app, launched in March last year, it was difficult for most people to get an invitation. During the summer, the limited implementation fueled intrigue and conversations, especially as big names in music, entertainment and technology created accounts. Even Oprah made an appearance. In the app, users hosted informal conversations where they would talk to hundreds of listeners – like a big conference, but more fun.

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

A clubhouse spokesman said the company had never excluded journalists many users have said that the rules of service – and their name – create a culture of exclusivity and secrecy. People mostly found out about particularly controversial or heated conversations after users shared audio clips from clubhouse rooms on Twitter and elsewhere. But the terms of service of Clubhouse made it clear: the part of what happened in the clubhouse outside the clubhouse was against the rules.

It was a nice sense of privacy that led to fun and whimsical moments on the app, such as sleeping song sessions or a lion king re-enactment. But the feeling also led to darker conversations that penetrated homophobia or took anti-Semitic turns.

These two opposing dynamics – bringing people together but also driving them apart – have intensified over the past few months as Clubhouse’s growth has exploded. Its founders said Sunday that the app has 2 million users, a huge growth from a few months ago. This week, investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, valued the service, which was less than a year old, at $ 1 billion. According to the company, raised $ 100 million in the round to Axios.

Meanwhile, the host was playing with conversations with newsmakers: 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 joined a digital clubhouse panel to discuss their cities – and announce them as candidates for technical pandemic removals – to thousands of attending listeners.

None of these events were open to the public. But they were not exactly private either. As Clubhouse’s profile has grown, more reporters and editors have found their way to the app over the past few months. Some of them discussed the increasingly high-profile discussions on the platform, as well as the young company’s controversies over harassment and moderation of the content.

The journalists did not arrive at the clubhouse by accident. Many of them received their coveted invitation from one particular clubhouse user, Sarah Szalavitz, a research and development consultant and former entertainment advocate. Since October, Szalavitz has made it a personal mission to invite as many reporters to clubhouse as possible. It is part of her quest to provide transparency in the app, which she says is designed in a way that promotes hate speech and radicalization without enough moderation to soften it.

Szalavitz has so far said she and her friends brought a few hundred journalists to Clubhouse, which in turn helped hundreds sign up. Earlier this year, she estimated that at least 1,800 joined the app in October, compared to her score at about 275.

Szalavitz, who also spent time teaching social design in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, said she saw Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. tends to punish bad actors “with enough media attention.” Her thinking about Clubhouse was simple: ‘The way to make changes was to pay attention to it,’ she said.

Initially, Szalavitz offered resistance join clubhouse. She 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, was harassed in the app after VCs complained about critical news coverage. But as the pandemic escalated, Szalavitz and her fiancé Sonar Luthra began to feel more lonely in their Los Angeles home. Their friends joined Clubhouse. In the fall, they tried it.

Immediately, Szalavitz said, she feels more connected to her friends and she is also engaging in conversations with people in her extensive network. Hearing someone’s voice without seeing their face was nicer and less uncomfortable than a Zoom event. She and Luthra offered rooms in Clubhouse daily to people who had telephone banking business for US presidential candidate Joe Biden. People could drop in and ask questions about how to get involved or share their experiences.

But Szalavitz also noted that the app was designed to limit the spread of conversations outside the digital walls. Unlike Twitter or Facebook, the app leaves no record of what is being said. Clubhouse’s terms of service prohibit the recording of the sound of a room unless everyone agrees – almost impossible with chat rooms that can accommodate thousands of people. And to get invitations to hand out to friends, users have to share their contact list with the company, something many journalists, who do not want to expose their resources, will do. “It’s a platform designed to evade accountability,” Szalavitz said.

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

A Clubhouse spokesman said racism, hate speech and abuse were banned in the app, and that moderation has always been a top priority. She cited moderation features, including blocking specific users and the ability to flag rooms for further investigation.

Initially, Szalavitz was willing to wait to see what policies Clubhouse’s team could add on their own. But her attitude changed after Yom Kippur, a few weeks after joining the app. That day, she offered an all-day chat room about reconciliation. Later that evening, another discussion room emerged, called ‘Anti-Semitism and Black Culture’, in which the speakers traded in anti-Semitic tropes. Jewish listeners pointed out that some of the speakers’ claims were extra painful, as the conversation took place on the holiest day of the year. Bloomberg News and other stores reported on the details of the conversation, but Szalavitz knew it could have easily passed without being discussed in public. She believed the app needed more accountability, and she felt she could not count on it coming from Clubhouse.