(Jewish Group) Exclusive Social Media App 'Clubhouse' Had an Anti-Semitic Meltdown Over Yom Kippur
An iron law of the internet is that it is only a matter of time between the creation of a social media platform and it being used to spread anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. In the case of Clubhouse, an invite-only, communal, voice-chat app popular among the Silicon Valley set, we now know exactly how long: The audio-based social network isn’t even publicly available yet, and has already had its first anti-Jewish eruption.
Clubhouse, which is currently valued at $100 million, is an exclusive app that allows users to participate in topical voice conversations controlled by the moderator who launches them. Its approximately 10,000 users include everyone from venture capitalist Mark Cuban to actors Jared Leto, Ashton Kutcher, and Kevin Hart. The platform’s audio-based culture offers a human touch and sense of interpersonal connection that its text-based competitors lack. At the same time, the app’s dynamic freewheeling nature poses unique moderation problems, as became evident this week.
On Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, a group of predominantly non-Jewish moderators convened a chat room on Clubhouse titled “Anti-Semitism and Black Culture.” The very framing of the conversation betrayed that it was not being run by those well-versed in the sensitivities of the subject. First, the title pit two minority communities against each other, rather than couching the issue carefully and constructively. Second, there was the date—Yom Kippur—an unintentional oversight that ironically underscored that the people starting this conversation desperately needed to have it, but also weren’t remotely qualified to lead it.
Unsurprisingly given the discussion’s charged framing, it quickly became one the most popular rooms on the exclusive platform, drawing 350 simultaneous users, and hundreds more who filtered in and out over the course of the multi-hour Monday conversation, including investors and people who work for Clubhouse.
The discussion began constructively, but quickly devolved into a stream of common anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish money, economic and political domination, and the Holocaust—or as one Jewish attendee put it, “an airing of grievances against Jews.” Audio provided to Tablet by a non-Jewish participant of color who was deeply troubled by what they heard features speakers continuously equating Jews with “whiteness,” erasing the experiences of nonwhite Jews—some of whom were in the room—and of Jews in general at the hands of white supremacists. One non-Jewish participant repeatedly declared that Jews and Blacks do not have the “same enemy,” apparently unaware of the alt-right marchers in Charlottesville who chanted “Jews will not replace us,” or the racist gunman who massacred the congregants of Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue. Jews were continually stereotyped as uniformly wealthy, and presented “as the face of capital,” according to several Jewish and non-Jewish participants present. “Multiple individuals justified anti-Semitism by saying it was a way to protest against capitalism,” reported a non-Jewish attendee who spoke to Tablet.
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I am shocked! Oh wait...no, I am not.
