Why Clubhouse Failed

What happened to the Clubhouse app?

The real story of why Clubhouse died.

Kris Ruby reports on the state of social audio and why Clubhouse failed

Social Audio Showdown

Today, we are going to talk about the social audio showdown, Clubhouse clones, and why Clubhouse failed. We’re also going discuss why creating a culture of fear of missing out (FOMO) is a mistake on social audio and the challenges of social audio content moderation as it pertains to the future of social audio.

How could someone who built an audience of over 25,000 people in three months be willing to walk away from all of that and be willing to leave that behind?

People don’t leave what they’ve built unless they have a real reason to leave and unless the consequences of staying are larger than the consequences of leaving.

WHY I DELETED CLUBHOUSE

I spent the past three and a half months engaged in the Clubhouse community and building a presence on Clubhouse. I created a group in political Clubhouse, which has over 14,000 members. My personal account has over 5,000 followers. There’s also a Public Relations, SEO and Content Marketing club I created with over 4,000 followers.

Today, I will share the story of someone who built a community and audience of over 25,000 people on social audio and ultimately chose to leave and walk away from what I built on the platform.

How could it be that a content creator who amassed an audience of over 25,000 people would choose to leave what they’ve built?

In marketing, things are either growing or they are stagnant. Our job as marketers is to move that lever of growth. We pull it when we want things to grow, stop growing or grow less.

When you see that someone is no longer growing, they’re not getting new followers, or their audience is not expanding, it is most likely intentional.

You may not realize it is on purpose. But make no mistake, it is.

Growing your audience or the decision to halt growth of an audience is intentional. We often only talk about the decision to grow, but we don’t spend enough time discussing the decisions we make as B2B marketers to stop growing on a platform.

You can intentionally choose to stop growing your audience on a social audio platform and it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

It is a conscious decision where someone has said, this is no longer worth my time to build on. Never build on something that is structurally weak and has a poor foundation. It will always collapse.

It doesn’t mean that you lost the follower war or the club war; it means that you made the decision to stop because your time was better spent elsewhere. That is not defeat. It is surrender to something better.

THE TOXIC CULTURE OF CLUBHOUSE

There were so many things that were wrong with the culture that Clubhouse created and that’s what I want to talk about today not because I want to talk about the mistakes Clubhouse made, but because I want to focus on the future of social audio and how other developers can hopefully learn from those mistakes.

Clubhouse culture was like Lord of the Flies.

It was a beta experiment and social experiment that we were all lab rats in.

As someone who starred in a Bravo reality show, my time on Clubhouse was infinitely more dramatic than the time I spent filming a reality show.

It was a toxic culture that resembled high school. Personally, I was happy to have left high school don’t want to find myself smack in the middle of the same antics.

A culture of chaos

I often felt like I was filming another reality show when I spoke on stage or moderated a room. The drama, the back channels, the DM’S and the Reddit threads were out of control. All of these things that I do not experience in my corporate life on a daily basis became part of my reality because of the culture created on this particular social audio platform. Twitter Spaces does not have the same issues, which shows me that the issues is with what the platform rewards, not with all of social audio.

Foundationally, the structure of Clubhouse was flawed from the beginning. We were all part of something that was fractured. It was akin to a piece of broken glass and any move that you made to try and put that glass back together created more fractures and ultimately something that was even more broken.

Not only was it broken, but people were becoming more broken in the process of trying to fix something that was broken. There was a lack of leadership and community management. Unfortunately, no one took the reins on this before it was too late. This created a series of micro communities that felt unheard.

When my account was wrongfully suspended, an employee from Clubhouse personally apologized by showing up in the political room I hosted on Clubhouse. People who had never ventured over to political Clubhouse were suddenly in my room and on my stage ready to air their grievances, which had nothing to do with the grievances I had about censorship and shadow banning of conservative content on Clubhouse.

This included every top influencer on the platform who showed up to represent the other clubs within the community because they all felt unheard. The issues that I had in Conservative and Republican Clubhouse were just one out of twenty other issues that people had on behalf of the communities that they had built.

They were unhappy that an employee from Clubhouse responded to me but not to them. That was the tip of the iceberg in terms of how people felt unheard. None of the communities were being properly managed and fostered with the proper seeds to grow. Every micro-community needed to feel heard.

This is what happens when social audio platforms pick winners and losers. When you preferentially choose a handful of people for a Creator First program and leave everyone else in the dust, there are bound to be problems.

It is important to note I think every other social media platform in this space who is launching similar programs is making the same mistake. These programs alienate content creators more than they reward them.

When internal political bias impacts content visibility decisions

Even when a Clubhouse employee did show up, I asked for an answer to the question as to why it was acceptable for the CMO to tweet that half of the country were “domestic terrorists” and to this day I have never received an answer. The CMO showed up in other rooms and addressed other community questions, but refused to address mine.

Not answering a question is an answer. No comment is a comment. It was clear that there were favorites, and the Republicans and Conservatives were not part of that list.

You either answer to everyone, or you answer to no one. When you make the decision to answer to some, you need to extend that unilaterally across the board to all creators.

Not a single conservative content creator was chosen or represented in the Creator First program. Instead of addressing the PR issue head on, they made it even worse by adding gasoline to the fire. It is also important to note that this lack of representation in terms of political diversity is an issue across the board not only with Clubhouse, but with every other creator program, including with Twitter Spaces Spark Program.

THE DANGER OF SOCIAL AUDIO REPORTING WITHOUT ROOM RECORDING

Creating a culture that revolves around fear of missing out because there is no recording feature is a toxic component of primitive social audio. I say primitive because now Clubhouse allows for room recording, making all of this a distant memory. But it is a terrible memory for those of us who were constantly told we would be suspended and thrown off an app if we recorded our own conversations. Now they have changed the rules.

Clubhouse’ constant changing of rules and policy terms is very reminiscent of what the U.S. government has done with Covid policies. It makes it hard to trust the foundation when it is always changing.

When there is no recording of a room, there is no accountability to the words that are said.

Words become left to interpretation and a never-ending game of he said, she said telephone. This also means reporting will always be inherently flawed and biased if you are trusting a reporter’s version of the events of a room without a recording of the room to judge for yourself.

A liberal reporter squatting in a Republican Clubhouse room will never report on that room the same way a Conservative reporter would. This doesn’t mean that one person is right and the other is wrong. It means that natural bias exists, and that is why recorded media is critical, so that we can get multiple interpretations of the same event and form our own opinion of what happened.

Without this, you are left with one arbiter of truth and it will always be biased. This is extremely dangerous. For this reason alone, the future of social audio reporting must include room recordings so that there is a record of tangible evidence and truth.

I witnessed this first hand when a reporter falsely reported on a room I hosted with Laura Loomer on tech censorship. In fact, the reporting was so false that a retraction and correction had to be issued because of how biased the reporter was.

When I told the reporters editor about what happened, his answer was that he wasn’t there for the room. He refused to even listen to a copy of the room recording and instead ran an article that was factually false. That reporter has since been let go from the publication and now works for another media outlet.

The two-hour room was on tech censorship and my reporting of how Clubhouse was breaking numerous clauses in Apples TOS. Instead, the reporter grabbed one line that the guest said out of a three-hour room and created a narrative around it that was picked up by every national media outlet. It spread like wildfire and no one bothered to fact check or verify the truth.

I later found out that this reporter was unhappy with Loomer for getting him fired at another job. This meant that I became an innocent casualty in their ongoing battle.

This is a perfect example of the liability one takes on when they host a room on social audio. You become a pawn in someone else’s game that you don’t know is being played until the story comes out and shots have been fired.

I have a business and a career I spent the past 15 years building. I do not have the luxury of playing Russian Roulette with my career because two people are in a dispute.

Every time I hosted a room, I played Russian roulette with my career, and ultimately, it was too much risk, with very little upside.

SOCIAL AUDIO, MENTAL HEALTH & DEPRESSION

There is a correlation of depression and increased social media usage. I have never seen depression skyrocket as much as it did during the three months on social audio platforms. Many people said they experienced PTSD from their time on social audio platforms and that it was a terrible experience for them. They reported being harassed, stalked, defamed and bullied, all by people who don’t know them and have never even met them in real life. I reported this story on BNC in a special segment on social media extortion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOdz1nXyTqg&t=99s

People don’t experience the same feelings or angst, anxiety or outrage when they listen to a podcast or watch a TV show. On social audio, people can see when you have entered the room and left a room. Every time you leave a room, someone is inevitably upset.

When you turn off a podcast, the hosts feelings don’t get hurt, because no one knows you changed the channel. However, when you leave someone’s room on social audio, there is a feeling of betrayal. You can instantly see when you have lost someone’s attention or engagement.

In marketing, that’s the thing that we are always after.

At what point have we captured their attention and at what point have we lost it?

Content creators may not be used to seeing that. There’s no ghost mode when you are listening to live content on social audio.

This means people are constantly focused on who is in the room and who is coming and going, vs. on what is actually being said. This creates chaos and a terrible show experience for the end user.

Users want to be able to passively listen to a room without insulting the show host if they leave a space.

When leaving a space is akin to changing the channel

Clubhouse drama revolved around power grabs for moderation.

The moderation gives power to one or a few people who ultimately don’t truly deserve to have moderator abilities.

MODERATION, SCHMODERATION

Moderation and being a facilitator used to mean something. It would mean that you could facilitate someone through a journey, that you were responsible for what happened in that process and that you facilitate that experience for someone. Now, people are moderating and facilitating journeys but have no idea how to facilitate or what that means or the responsibility that comes along with facilitating and moderating.

There is a lack of leadership from the top down on social audio, not only with the executives and investors of the apps, but with the moderators and hosts of rooms. That is the most unfortunate part of all of this, especially given how much Silicon Valley has poured into the development of new social audio apps.

Clubhouse was like state run TV. If you listen to something in your ear every day, you will start to believe it. This is a well-known propaganda and war tactic. This is why it is extremely important to pay attention to the channel you tune into. It can literally become your reality. This is a tremendous opportunity for marketers and community builders, but it can also be weaponized by bad actors looking to infiltrate U.S. policy.

The social pressure of exclusion

A culture of inclusion does not exist on social audio. Social audio by nature is built around power grabs, control, ego and excluding others. The neurodiversity community faces considerable challenges on social audio. I held a room on neurodiversity inclusion and still, people continue to say things like, people just need to pick up on social cues and read between the lines. Telling someone with ASD to read the room is the opposite of inclusion.

The ASD community rooms were great, but the way people were treated outside of these rooms was not. The constant bullying of people on the spectrum is something I have taken a personal interest in course correcting.

SPOTIFY GREENROOM VS. CLUBHOUSE

Ultimately, the same issues quickly emerged on Spotify Greenroom.

The same problematic issues that existed on one platform have now moved to another platform because they are not built by creators.

Live podcasting is problematic for several reasons because social audio is not the same produced content that a podcast delivers. The audio quality suffers and not every social audio host wants to be a podcaster or content creator.

Content creators want to be inclusive, but how can they be inclusive when platforms create products that automatically exclude others?

Dark mode is important for accessibility.

Accessibility is not something that should be thought of as an afterthought or a PR move. It is much harder to build in accessibility later then from the start. There is no excuse for anyone who is building a new social audio app to not be building a platform that is accessible.

As a content creator, it not only puts you in a terrible position, it also opens you up to liability. If your audience is hard of hearing, or they’re not able to see your basically creating content on a platform that is openly saying that they’re discriminating against these audiences, which transfers this liability to the content creator.

I applaud Facebook for what they have done with the social audio product they are developing. They are the first that I’ve seen to build auto generated captions for users to be able to follow what’s going on, which is a step in the direction.

Clubhouse is primitive in nature compared to the new social audio apps that have emerged in the space. They are now racing to keep up with competitors by adding clips, pinned links and direct messaging, but it lacks originality or creativity.

Pinned links are great for marketers if you want to drop links directly in the group chat. The group chat can also be easily spammed and there is no content moderation functionality within the chat to report a user.

There will be a time when we look back at social audio and think, how could I have wasted so much time on content that was never recorded?

It doesn’t matter how much money Silicon Valley dumps if we don’t address the root cause of why Clubhouse failed.

If people are broken, the app will always be broken, because it is the people that make the app and the community. This is something Silicon Valley fundamentally doesn’t understand because they keep overlooking the content moderation issues with social audio.

Human in the loop

Social audio requires a heavy investment in people, technology, resources, AI, and ultimately, a full-time support team that is available 24/7.

The real problem is that social audio platforms are not built by creators for creators.

Instead, they are built by investors who see this as an opportunity to make money, but they’re not understanding why ultimately each of these social audio platforms will fail if they don’t learn from the mistakes of Clubhouse and they don’t actually listen to their creators.

No, that does not just mean dangling a creator fund at them or a few thousand dollars a month in a Creator First program.

The creator economy needs to support creators, instead of exploiting them.

At the start of my career, people used to get paid hundreds of dollars to provide feedback in focus group. Today, social media users freely hand over this information to Silicon Valley in the format of “Feedback Friday” spaces or Townhall discussions.

Creators think this is an opportunity for them to feel heard, but what they don’t realize is that it’s actually an opportunity to make sure they don’t get paid for their thoughts. You are building a product without being compensated for it. No consultant would provide feedback to a client without getting paid for their knowledge.

Do you think McKinsey would participate in a Feedback Friday? No. They would send a hefty invoice for recommendations. Teaching creators that they should give away their ideas without compensation hurts the entire creator economy and entrepreneur community at large.

Why should a client pay you for feedback you freely give to other people who don’t pay you?

As marketers and content creators, we are paid for our thoughts. If a client said, what do you think of my website, would you tell them what is wrong with it without a consulting agreement? No. So why are you doing the same thing for a company you have no equity in and are building for free?

You can’t demand to be paid for your time and thoughts if you freely give out your time and thoughts to people on social audio.

For this reason alone, this is why you will almost never see me running a PR or media room. My thoughts are reserved for paying clients.

If you are going to provide free feedback, it should be in exchange for something. If you are receiving nothing in exchange for your thoughts, you are an unpaid 1099, and that is a form of exploitation.

Let’s also not forget the slow drip feature they used to dangle carrots of monetization. It was constantly a system of the haves vs. the have nots. The people who got monetization first. The chosen people vs. the peasants. This system created infighting between users. When companies insert their editorial preferences into social audio, it hurts the entire creator economy.

This was a psychological experiment that went horribly wrong at the expense of the users.

This is a tragedy because it could have been a great app, but ultimately it wasn’t because of a failure of leadership from the beginning and because they never realized the size and sheer power of what they built. When they finally did, it was already too late.

Blowing off requests to speak with the media, blocking the media (several Clubhouse employees blocked me from being able to listen to their rooms so that I couldn’t report as a commentator) and ignoring frequent trust and safety concerns was a terrible precedent to set.

The executives could have been leaders in the space. They could have owned the space and truly dominated. Instead, they will be the Toys R’ Us and Blockbuster of social audio.

It could have gone differently, but it didn’t and that is also because of the lack of investment in people. When they finally did invest in talent, it was too little too late. So now they’re going to grow, but can you grow when people have already left. When they’re gone, can you regain that lost trust? Hiring someone to recruit lost users won’t ever change the levels of damaged trust. Similarly, changing your name won’t regain lost trust either (Meta/ Facebook).

If people don’t feel safe to build on the platform, they’re going to leave that platform. If they don’t feel like they own what they’re building in terms of their IP, they will also leave. I saw that with the club that I built very quickly, where someone could just duplicate the name. Unless you had invested in trademarking that name, you were going to lose. As soon as I saw that, I thought, wait a second, this is a complete and total waste of time.

People are excited about the social audio trend, but in the process, they are getting hurt by their own excitement because they’re not protected and they’re not thinking like a business owner.

Instead, they are a participant in a social experiment they don’t know they are a part of and they’re getting burned in the process.

First of all, social audio is actually very expensive.

If you are serious about creating content on social audio, you should know the following:

· You need an attorney to protect against libel/ defamation.

· You need to invest in a trademark.

· You need to invest in written contracts with guests, co-hosts and moderators.

If you’re going to have a moderator, don’t trust people that you meet online to co-moderate with you. Without an NDA or moderator contractual agreement, there’s nothing to in writing to stop the person from taking the concept you came up with create their own without you because you’re not legally protected.

Proxy and clout by association.

The people who surrounded me ultimately just used me to get on stage and for clout to open up doors. These are the same people who never would have actually keynoted anything adjacent to me (or you) on stage.

If you are an empath, it is important to remember that your own kindness will hurt you in the world of social audio where people are constantly looking to social climb.

These are not your friends. In fact, they are your enemies, disguised as your friends. This is who you are moderating with. And when something bad happens in your life, the people who begged to speak on your stage will be MIA. Crickets. You will only hear from these people again when they need something from you.

After experiencing true tragedy and loss and seeing how little these people cared that I spent months speaking to, I could never look at them the same again. It wasn’t only that the app was theoretically broken, it was the people that were. That is something you can’t unsee after you see it.

These are some of the major obstacles that social audio plays face. I went from spending over 15 hours a week on to less than 15 minutes a week. I do not want to invest time in something that has a low yield.

Ultimately, what is the ROI of the time you’re spending on social audio? If you don’t have any recording and if there’s no transcript of that conversation, you can’t turn that into other content.

You can’t repurpose that content.

So the yield is going to be low. That’s why at a minimum, the recording feature of social audio is so important for content marketers.

Even if you do nothing with the recording and never publish it, it’s important to have a copy of the recording of conversations for your own legal purposes and liability in case anything ever happens with a room that you always have a backup copy of it.

It also enables you to be more present in a room to hear what is going om and focus on what is being said rather than frantically trying to write notes down of what people are saying so that you can listen to it later on.

MENTAL HEALTH + SOCIAL AUDIO

The biggest threat is the mental health threat and the toll that it takes on the people that are part of these beta tests that don’t actually realize what it means to be a beta user.

Some users felt that the issue of every community was thrust on them and rightfully so, they feel that way because users are being used in a way where they’re not being paid for their feedback and they’re ultimately building out each of these platforms.

Ethically, that is a questionable business model, especially when we see how much money is being poured into the development of these apps by VCs in Silicon Valley.

Spotify Greenroom tried to protect themselves with contractual language saying to let people know by the way that any ideas you have, you’re not going to be compensated for, if you give us any feedback on what we can improve here for functionality. So that was their way of protecting themselves.

But ultimately, are you as the user protected? The TOS to not truly protect anyone and we’ve seen with Section 230 of The Communications Decency Act that all of these platforms are protected with a legal shield of liability and immunity.

But what is very clear to me is that the end user is not protected in any way. Your mental health is not protected. The stalking, the harassment, the bullying, the direct messages, the back channels, none of that is protected for the end-user on these platforms.

All of those things are at the root cause of the challenges of social audio, regardless of the name of the platform.

Furthermore, people love to call people frauds and scam artists on social audio. But when these same scammers join a new platform, are they not a scammer? Or have they been reborn? This trend of pretending people you don’t like will disappear is unrealistic in the digital world and metaverse we live in.

You can coexist with someone without trying to ruin their life.

A scammer on Clubhouse will still be a scammer on Twitter Spaces. You don’t have to blow the lid on their “scams” because they will most likely to a great job of revealing it on their own.

The same people peddle the same schtick from platform to platform. You do not have to be the platform police.

What is fascinating to me is how we’re watching this play out on each new social audio platform that is created and yet, no one can see the common denominator to fix it.

Whose responsibility is that?

Is America so broken that we can’t get along with each other? Should app developers be doing something differently to try and make it easier for us to get along with each other or is social audio really a reflection of just how broken society is?

I’m beginning to think it’s the latter, that social audio truly reflects the fractured society that has become America, where there is no room for other opinions where everyone is vying for the microphone even if they have nothing to say.

Where people are talking over each other and screaming at each other.

People are shouting at each other.

People are defaming each other with no thought as to what those consequences could be and with no thought that the person they are defaming has a business.

SOCIAL AUDIO & CANCEL CULTURE

People quickly forget that users have real lives off platform. When you attack someone by name, you are attacking their livelihood, search engine results, and career prospects. This is not a simulated game. When people are off of these platforms, they have to go back to their life, to their career, to their family.

There is a disconnect and there is an inherent amount of risk and liability you’re taking on every time you decide speak on platforms, whether that’s on a stage or even in the audience. The ability to post a small room snippet with little regard to the consequences or repercussions of what that means, how things are interpreted and also the reporting.

Additionally, there are those who use fake names and anonymity to avoid any real-world consequences to their reputation. The rest of us who work in the media do not have that luxury and are often the subject of vitriol from the anonymous trolls because they will never face the same repercussions on Google because no one has any idea who they are talking to outside of a fake name and fake photo of an NFT purchased with a burner wallet.

I use my name because I have pride in my name. I stand behind my name and photo because I believe in transparency and holding people accountable to the truth. How can you hold an anonymous source accountable to the truth when they won’t even use a real name? The consequences for their speech vs. your own are not in any way the same. This extreme disparity leads to a plethora of real-world SEO issues and PR issues.

Yes, you have free speech (kind of).

But just because you have the ability to slander someone, does not mean you should.

You can still win a war without taking everyone down with you in the process.

Burning bridges only burns you.

It does not help the cause of getting the issues of social audio fixed. Instead, it perpetuates the cycle of chaos and drama that these executives are looking at us to create. They want the drama. The algorithm supports and encourages engagement where chaos thrives.

We must rise above this to be better than the lab experiment we have been thrown into. The more infighting there is between users, the more investors see a high stickiness factor.

The spin off rooms keep people on the apps. This is what they want. It is not good for your mental health, but it is good for their numbers.

MEDIA BLACKOUT ON SOCIAL AUDIO: WHY?

There are also issues when it comes to reporting on these platforms, which is that the reporters who have tried to report found themselves ultimately in the middle of the story, which is not something that anyone wants to find themselves in if you are reporting on social media. That has led to a media blackout of reporting on these platforms because people don’t want to be part of the story. They want to figure out how they can report on something without being in the middle of the drama that is social audio.

Ultimately, there’s no great way to do that, which means that whatever trauma or drama is going on in these sites, the person who is trying to report on it is going to find themselves smack in the middle of that. I have asked other reporters to step in and report on the cyber bullying, harassment, hate speech, and rampant antisemitism. When I tried to ping them into a room, their answer was, ‘I don’t have time for this.’

If reporters don’t have time to report, then who does?

There is not much reporting on the true issues of social audio. We live in a time where people are afraid to report because they know the existential consequences of what it means to report.

Reporting on social audio is the equivalent of reporting on a war that you are in the middle of. A war that you never actually even asked to be in, but the only way to accurately report on what’s happening is to be in the middle of it.

Is to be on the ground to have boots on the ground of what is going on in the middle of that war. Unless you are actually part of this social audio culture, you won’t understand, and it will sound crazy to anyone else who’s listening to it, but the people who are part of it know exactly what it is that I’m talking about.

You weren’t part of what happened. You’re reporting on what happened, but you’re not the story. This paradigm shift is challenging for new and old media figures alike to figure out how to navigate this new digital landscape.

It takes a mental toll on the people who in order to report are putting themselves through emotional trauma and re-experiencing that trauma on a daily basis by being part of this cesspool of social audio toxicity. That is why a lot of the stories you read about social audio are extremely positive because they’re written by people who’ve never even used these platforms or apps, which is highly concerning in and of itself.

There is also rampant disrespect for traditional members of the media on new media platforms where everyone thinks that if they have the ability to record, that makes them a member of the media, despite lacking the training or formal education that goes into having a background in media. That is a whole other component that plays out every day on social audio platforms.

There is disdain for anyone who is a traditional member of the media within the social audio ecosystem. Simply put, users don’t want them there and frequently block reporters from listening to conversations.

I can’t tell you how many times I entered a room only to hear, “She is a reporter. Block her. Throw her out of the room!”

So even though social audio is having a moment, what you need to ask yourself is what does that moment mean for you?

What is your moment in life is your moment in life? that you want. and up-level or do you want to take on this risk? That means that for social audio to have a moment, it means you may not.

And it means by you buying into the myth that this is the next gold rush and maybe it is, but it also means that you may get stomped over in the process.

During the pandemic, many people were lonely. We were all looking for a connection and social audio came at the perfect place and the perfect time to provide that connection.

But ultimately, was that connection ever real?

Were those relationships real or were we all just talking to strangers that we thought were our friends that never were? So many of us are waking up to this new reality where we invested time in relationships with people we thought cared about us. Ultimately, they never did.

Not only do we not have any relationships to show for it, but we also have no content to show for it.

When I evaluate the ROI, what are we walking away with from this time that we spent? These hundreds of hours that we spent talking to people that we thought we were building something with and creating communities that we’re ultimately walking away from creating audiences that we now have to port over somewhere else.

Putting ourselves out there only to have no recordings of it, no transcripts of it, nothing else that we can do with the time we spent on there and more headaches than anything that is a positive yield or outcome.

In addition to that, there’s ethically a lot of challenges.

CLOWNHOUSE + HIPAA VIOLATIONS + SOCIAL AUDIO

I have witnessed psychiatrists hosting social audio chat rooms giving medical advice, despite their disclaimer saying they are not giving medical advice. They’re talking to people after these rooms via DM and they also pontificate about the psychiatric diagnosis of users to other users. I’m not sure how HIPAA compliant any of these rooms are because they’re also created in a way where the blocking feature has been weaponized so that people who really need the help can’t get the help.

People who are actually trying to hear this advice are then blocked from being able to hear the advice and the moderators of these rooms know this, and yet continue to do it and continue to have people on their stage that are weaponizing the blocking feature to make sure that people can’t get help.

If I ever hire a psychiatrist or psychologist, I will look them up on every social audio platform. If they are active on there, I will not hire them. I have seen way too many doctors reveal confidential personal information about patients. This gives me anxiety and it should give you anxiety, too, that you are a case study to be shared with strangers for clicks, follower counts and engagement.

Your trauma is not someone else’s enjoyment.

Your trauma is not a show on Clubhouse.

Your trauma should not be recorded without your consent.

THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL AUDIO

The future of social audio must include building more mental health features and functionality including suicide assistance if someone is on the verge of suicide because of the bullying taking place in a social audio chat room.

I have personally heard stories of a doctor who attempted to commit suicide because of the bullying that happened not only on Clubhouse, but on all of these ancillary platforms as a result of the initial discussion on Clubhouse.

That’s the scariest part. It’s not only what happens in the room, it’s what happens after the room when the room ends and how that transcends to all of these other things, whether that’s a newsletter, whether that’s Reddit, whether that’s YouTube, whether it’s Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, any other platform, or even Discord.

So it never truly ends. There’s never a way for people that want peace. It’s just this never-ending saga that continues. And ultimately you have to decide for your own mental health.

Do you want to be part of this social experiment or do you want until this is a little bit more advanced and developed so that you’re not getting dragged into the process.

THE CHALLENGES OF SOCIAL AUDIO CONTENT MODERATION

When we talk about the future of social audio, there’s a big challenge. What is hate speech and what isn’t and how do you moderate it?

What that means is not only a comprehensive terms of service and a privacy policy that is sound and applied equally across the board that is based on constitutional law in the U.S. but also something that’s not politically biased, which is another important component, especially when we’re talking about content moderation on the right versus the left.

But there are inherent challenges of content moderation and that’s partially because these companies haven’t really gotten the mix right of AI versus humans in terms of training the dataset to figure out what is hate speech and what isn’t.

They need to get that mix right and when we talk about GPT-3 or OpenAI or any of these other artificial intelligence tools or underlying models, they are all different datasets and you need to train those models.

We are all part of the data in the social experiment that they’re using to train a model on that has not been trained.

There are going to be a lot of mistakes and we are the people this model will make mistakes on. I don’t think anyone truly grasps what that actually means. This is something that will be reported on five years from now. There will probably be a documentary on it.

Machine learning experts need to not only focus on improving audio discovery, but also on improving the moderation of hate speech on social audio.

We have all seen the documentaries about Cambridge Analytica or The Social Dilemma.

I predict the early days of social audio will be the greatest failed social experiment of all time.

SOCIAL AUDIO NATIONAL SECURITY CONCERNS

From a national security perspective, no one has raised a single question on where this content is hosted? Where are the servers located?

Are the servers in China? The people who have recordings of this data- who is actually listening to that data? Who has access to that data? Are we talking about the CIA, the FBI, other national security agencies, law enforcement?

Who is listening to these conversations?

Also, from a political perspective, how can these conversations impact elections?

We saw how Facebook had an ability to impact the U.S. election. But what about social audio? We haven’t seen that yet. Will we discover the answer after it is too late?

Whoever owns this data may be giving that to advertisers or other actors with malicious intent. The data can be misused when you use NLP to parse through what people are saying for hours on end about what they think about each cause, each politician, and every issue that we are facing in America.

I see no questions being asked at all. There are a litany of privacy and data security issues with the right to be forgotten.

On Clubhouse, I requested a copy of my data, which is part of the law. I finally received a copy of my data after publicly tweeting about the CCPA and GDPR violation.

That’s why we have laws that are supposed to be held in place to protect users to make sure that they have access to their data. No one is watching this because social audio is a new burgeoning area. So much of the legislative efforts have gone into regulating text-based speech, but not social audio based speech.

In America, we have laws that are antiquated and outdated that don’t keep up with technology. That is the greatest threat that no one sees and the greatest liability that no one understands until they finally encounter the consequences of social audio gone horribly wrong.

· Who is listening to these recordings?

· Who owns this data?

· What can happen if this data is placed in the wrong hands?

· Do I trust the social audio company?

· Where are their servers hosted?

· Do I know anything about this company?

· How much control do third-party advertisers have over data and room recordings?

Look up every company. Review their corporate filings before you download their apps.

With one of these companies, it actually shows that in their corporate filings, it’s a foreign filing. It is not even US-based- despite pretending to be.

We need to ask more questions about this rather than get excited that a new social audio platform has launched.

We need to ask the tough questions of who is spying on us?

Who is listening to this information and how will this information be used against us?

Who is reading the private DMs sent on these platforms?

And, ultimately, are we ready to take on the mental health ramifications of being part of the social experiment, which I don’t think anyone has asked themselves until it’s too late.

CONCLUSION

These are the conversations that more of us need to have on social audio rather than talking about Twitter Spaces versus Clubhouse or the latest clone, or who is investing in a new social audio app.

Social audio is moving so fast that we need to slow down and say, wait a second, what went wrong and what can we learn from it?

If you are investing and building and not asking these questions, ultimately, it’s not going to be a great investment because these issues will keep happening over and over again because America may be broken and until we figure out how we can fix those issues, a social audio app won’t be the solution. The issues are platform agnostic.

Broken people break things.

Someone recently said to me, hurt people hurt other people. It is safe to assume that no one intentionally hurt anyone else. We are all just trying to survive.

The beta app exploited users and maybe we all exploited each other. Not intentionally, but reflexively to protect ourselves from fending off incoming harm because we were all living through a simulated Lord of The Flies experiment. Do better and be better the next time around. But that includes you, too, Silicon Valley.

ABOUT KRIS RUBY

Kris Ruby produces nuanced social audio content covering the periphery of social audio and politics. Ruby is a pioneer in the world of social audio and hosts Twitter Spaces with politicians, veterans, and U.S. Government elected officials. As an early adopter of social audio, Ruby is committed to cultivating the leading political space in social audio. Her rooms are at the forefront of Politics, Media, Social Media, & Government. She is dedicated to creating transparent discussion when it comes to U.S. politics with members of diverse political parties. Her motto is, “debate policy, not people.” On any given night, you can find a diverse group of politicians and members of the media in Ruby’s Twitter spaces including members of U.S. Congress, AP reporters, DOJ federal prosecutors, U.S. Army public affairs officers or primetime cable news pundits and anchors.

Ruby interviews politicians, members of Congress, veterans, military officers, former department of justice officials, Pentagon reporters and more. Kris runs the room like a cable news network. Her background is in media and PR as a political commentator on national news for over 15 years.

Did you enjoy this story? Support my work by following Kris Ruby on Twitter @sparklingruby

ADDITIONAL REPORTING:

Social media spreads antisemitic and anti-Israeli sentiment

https://www.foxnews.com/us/israeli-palestinian-anger-facebook-twitter-tiktok