China blocks the Clubhouse app that briefly created a platform for taboo themes

SHANGHAI / BEIJING – The U.S. audio app Clubhouse was banned in China on Monday, said consumers and anti-censorship watchdog, ending a short window that allowed thousands of mainland users to engage in talks that were often censored in China.

Launched in early 2020, Clubhouse’s global user numbers soared earlier this month after Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev held a spectacular debate on the platform.

Many new users came in from mainland China, taking part in talks on topics that included sensitive issues such as Xinjiang detention camps, Taiwan independence and Hong Kong national security law .

However, users of the social media app like Twitter Weibo in China started posting issues of accessing the Clubhouse app on Monday night. Some of them showed screenshots of a message displayed by the app when they tried to open that said a secure connection to the server was not possible.

Anti-censorship website GreatFire.org said on Twitter late Monday that the app was blocked for users in China at around 7pm during Beijing that day.

Many Western social media apps including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are banned in China, where the local internet is tightly regulated and often censored its content. could weaken the Communist Party of the country.

The clubhouse did not respond to requests for comment. The Cyberspace Administration in China, the country’s main internet regulator, did not immediately respond to a fax request for comment.

“The club has been given a wall,” one Weibo user said Monday, referring to the system China is using to regulate its internet.

“This is just too fast,” said another.

Many Weibo posts considering blocking the app were removed from the platform by Tuesday morning.

The Clubhouse app is only available on iOS devices and is not available in the local Apple app store in China, but Chinese users had access to the app by changing the app store setting aca.

As initial reports of the internet breaches began on Monday, nearly 3,000 users opened a room in the Club House to discuss whether it had been blocked by Chinese censors, with some expressing concerns that authorities could monitor negotiations.

Some users urged others not to panic.

“Let bullets fly for a while. We’ll keep an eye out for a few days first, don’t worry yet,” said one user.

Kaiser Kuo, a China – focused Podcast Sinica guest posted a live tweet on Sunday of some of the conversations he was hearing in a room discussing the Uighur situation.

He noted how Han Chinese – the main ethnic group in China – and people from the Uighur persecution community were interacting in space.

A spokesman heard a spokesman identifying himself as a Chinese on the mainland oppose the term “concentration camps” – although he admits there are facilities.

Many of the listeners were enthralled by the candles of the online conversations.

“I am in a Taiwanese-run room in Clubhouse where there are 4,000 Mandarin speakers – including Uyghurs and Han Chinese IN CHINA, and outside talking about… a h -everything, ”tweeted Berlin-based journalist Melissa Chan.

“From alertness, to friends who have left re-education camps, to normal stuff.”