The Clubhouse app is invite-only, but slowly open

Photographer: Christoph Dernbach / picture alliance / Images

When Clubhouse, a private social app, was launched in March last year, it was difficult for most people to get an invitation. During the summer, its limited release fueled intrigue and chatter, especially as big names in music, entertainment and technology created accounts. Up until Oprah made an appearance. In the app, users hosted impromptu informal conversations, in which they chatted with hundreds of listeners – like a big conference call, but more fun.

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

A Clubhouse spokeswoman said the company never excluded journalists, but many users said the service’s rules – and their name – created a culture of exclusivity and secrecy. Most of the time, people found conversations particularly controversial or heated after users shared audio clips from Clubhouse rooms on Twitter and elsewhere. But the Clubhouse terms of service made it clear: sharing what happened in the Clubhouse outside the Clubhouse was against the rules.

It was a friendly sense of privacy that led to fun and whimsical moments in the app, like lullaby sessions or a Lion King reconstitution. But that feeling also fostered darker conversations that involved homophobia or they took anti-Semitic attitudes.

These two opposing dynamics – bringing people together, but also separating them – have been expanded in recent months as the Clubhouse’s growth has exploded. Its founders said on Sunday that the app had 2 million users, a huge growth from just a few months earlier. This week, investors like Andreessen Horowitz valued the service, which is not yet a year old, at $ 1 billion. The startup raised $ 100 million in the round, according to for Axios.

In the meantime, he was the scene of hot topic conversations with journalists: the San Francisco district attorney joined in a heated chat about urban crime earlier this month. And a few days later, the mayors of Miami, San Francisco and Austin, Texas, all participated in a Clubhouse digital panel to talk about their cities – and present them as candidates for technological pandemic relocations – to thousands of assembled listeners.

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

The journalists did not arrive at the Clubhouse by accident. 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 made it a 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 has been designed in a way that encourages hate speech and radicalization without enough moderation to mitigate that.

So far, Szalavitz said, she and her friends have brought several hundred journalists to the Clubhouse, who in turn have helped to sign up hundreds of others. Earlier this year, she estimated that at least 1,800 joined the app, compared to about 275, by their accounts, in October.

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

At first, Szalavitz resisted join the Clubhouse. She had 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 media coverage. But as the pandemic progressed, Szalavitz and her fiance, Sonaar Luthra, began to feel more lonely at their home in Los Angeles. His friends were joining the Clubhouse. Then, in the fall, they tried.

Immediately, Szalavitz said, she felt more connected to her friends and also started talking to people in her extended network. Hearing someone’s voice without seeing your face was more fun and less awkward than a Zoom meeting. She and Luthra started hosting daily rooms in the Clubhouse for people who worked over the phone for then-presidential candidate Joe Biden – people could come up 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 said. Clubhouse terms of service prohibit recording audio from a room, unless everyone agrees – almost impossible with chat rooms that can accommodate thousands of people. And to receive invitations to distribute to friends, users need to share their contact list with the company, something that many journalists, fearing to expose their sources, will not do. “This is a platform that was designed to escape responsibility,” said Szalavitz.

As she spent more time on the app, she realized that some dividing figures were active in the Clubhouse, like Curtis Yarvin, a blogger whose ideas inspired leaders of the alternative right. And she was frustrated when the company did not take decisive action after she and others raised concerns about moderation during the Clubhouse’s virtual “prefectures” with its founders.

A Clubhouse spokeswoman said that racism, hate speech and abuse are prohibited on the app and that moderation has always been a priority. She cited moderation features, including blocking specific users and the ability to flag 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 a few weeks after she entered the app. That day, she organized a chat room all day about atonement. Later that night, another discussion room emerged, called “Anti-Semitism and Black Culture”, in which the speakers trafficked anti-Semitic tropes. Jewish listeners pointed out that some of the speakers’ statements were even more painful, as the conversation was taking place on the holiest day of the year. Bloomberg News and other media reported the details of the conversation, but Szalavitz knew that it could have easily escaped without being discussed publicly. She believed that the app needed more responsibility and felt she couldn’t count on it coming from the Clubhouse itself.