Clubhouse is the app that was born under the pandemic that was so successful among insiders in the entertainment industry and aggregated an entire community locked in due to Covid restrictions in 2020. Barely a year later, so many artists have walked away from social, leaving the music and audio conversation app at the mercy of groups and gangs armed with the worst social squadrism. Paradoxically, Clubhouse being currently one of the most free social compared to others and selling out every month with a few avatars of its app that call for social and racial integration, is increasingly hostage and prey to armed groups and gangs that spend their time creating dissension and problems for content creators.
Clubhouse, tension grows: ‘No to proscription lists and psychological pressure’
Aspects solved according to the creators of the platform thanks to a closure of the different rooms (rooms) into superstructures called Houses (houses) where it was possible to make a sorting of those who are inside with the aim of empowering the creators in moderation, making use of additional administrators chosen from the public.
What if instead replacing moderators are policies and algorithms easily circumvented by groups of haters and trolls?
One aspect that remains to be clarified, that of the function of blocking and reporting that also finds several obstacles in the medium of this social technology: voice. The result of this digital transformation composed of several updates made over time is that it allows extremist groups of a fascist, ultra-extremist and supremacist nature, not only of white people, but also Afro descendants and bearers of LGBTQ interests, to carry out real squadrist actions against content creators who still believe in the app and use it to consolidate friendship relationships born on the now godforsaken platform. The Italian community for example consists of a maximum of 300 active users, and those who frequent the rooms always fear for the virtual safety of their profiles because a mass report could happen to anyone and be condemned by the platform even if they are innocent.
A perverse mechanism stoppable thanks to the system of blocks useful for marginalizing unpleasant encounters with elements dedicated to performing acts contrary to the norms of civilized living, but the real defeat of the two creators of the social is that they do not actually provide a useful moderation system to safeguard decent people from those who enjoy taking provocative, defamatory and at the same time inconsistent with the platform’s code of conduct. Indeed, it is precisely they who use the platform to carry out censorious, repressive and borderline law-abiding activities.
In short, the more deviant one is, the more one is rewarded by the platform’s moderation system, and this makes, as in many other cases of other social networks, Clubhouse part of the “fascist” attitudes aimed at censoring the thoughts and free expression of users, with a pinch of assumptions to assume real crimes that are consummated on a platform created to be inclusive and useful in shortening the distance between people with physical difficulties such as blind people and patients of genetic diseases such as one of the two founders’ sons.
This paucity of control and overuse with the use of policies and the platform is now justified and tolerated by users because of the cut in funding that has affected the platform in the last period, the recipient of an initial funding that did not allow it to make the big leap and that risks leading Clubhouse toward total bankruptcy if it is not acquired by some major component of the social or hedge fund world.
Users suffering strange advertisements and the privacy issue
What is certain to date is that Clubhouse absolutely does not make money through an advertising system; on the contrary, it would seem that the data processed by users are arranged on a par with any other social platform and according to the investigation of the Italian Guarantor even as a fraudulent way of transferring data to third parties and strange coincidences that users detect on the voice metrics, based on the conversations that are consumed within the rooms.
Clubhouse: 2 million fine by privacy watchdog
In a nutshell, Clubhouse acquires voice data from the Rooms by turning them into texts that then allow users to be profiled, and based on the conversations many frequenters, of the few that are left, notice that targeted advertisements later appear on other platforms that relate to the conversations they had.
A suspicion that occurs elsewhere as well, which of course no one pays attention to anymore since it now represents the tragic end of Internet users’ privacy. What is astonishing, however, is that the two creators are actually people who generated and gave birth to a social network with good intentions, also due to critical family health conditions, but who have failed to improve it over time making it hostage to the same values they tried to fight as squadrism, fascism, racism, xenophobia and supremacism of all kinds: from white to black to rainbow.
An app for the disabled or for haters?
Yet it would be curious to know if the creator would wish his disabled son to spend time on a social where he can be targeted, offended, delegitimized and risk even being banned in the indifferent smiles of his tormentors.
Nothing less than that …. Kudos.
