Journalists Worried About People Having Conversations on Clubhouse

All good things must come to an end—or at least become the subject of a scoldy Poynter article and a prominent New York Times tech reporter compiling a list of “issues and incidents.” In this case, the target is Clubhouse, a nascent audio-only conversation app that’s part-chatroom, part–conference panel, part–good happy hour, the kind where you leave feeling like your subway fare wasn’t wasted. The Poynter piece levies complaints and concerns at the app, including that “Clubhouse’s design inherently excludes people with certain disabilities” by making “zero affordances” for those who are deaf or hearing-impaired. (Unfortunately, it’s fairly impractical to make real-time audio apps both accessible and enjoyable to deaf people.) But Poynter quickly moves on to its more central concern, which is that the app poses a problem for fact-checkers since it “doesn’t keep old posts or audio files and doesn’t allow users to record conversations.” In fact, “there is no way to prove that someone said anything controversial at all,” the article notes, citing Grit Daily’s Olivia Smith. This seems like it would be bad for snitches and media industry narcs,  » Read More