People who have spent time on social media knows that most social media platforms have a lot of trolls, reply-guys, and other people who are unpleasant to interact with.
On massive platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, the option to block another user allows you to keep someone out of your news feed.
Blocking is far from a bulletproof solution, but it gives users a way to continue to use the platforms and avoid nasty interactions.
Clubhouse's Weak Banning Measures
Will Oremus, a writer for The Atlantic, reported that the year-old audio chat platform Clubhouse has a different mechanism for blocking users, one that affects more than just the blocker and the person who is blocked.
According to Oremus' report, when you block someone on Clubhouse, it does not just affect communications between the two of you, as it would on Twitter or Facebook.
Blocking someone limits the way that the person can communicate with others on the platform. Once a person is blocked, they can't join or even see any room that you create, or in which you are speaking, which effectively blocks them from everyone else in that room.
If you are brought "onstage" from the audience to talk, anyone else in the audience whom you have blocked will be kept off the stage for as long as you are up there.
If you are a moderator of a room, you can block a speaker and remove them from the conversation in real-time, even if they are mid-sentence.
In essence, a black badge on Clubhouse can limit who speaks, where, and when on the platform, as reported by The Verge.
Oremus noted that it is a social act to block another person on Clubhouse, and one that affects multiple interactions.
Members of underrepresent groups said that blocking can be weaponized on the platform, such as to squelch certain points of view, or restrict conversations.
The report pointed out a case wherein a woman in her 20 who is studying medicine, said that she has been barred from rooms discussing vaccination because an influential anti-vaxxer who frequents those rooms blocked her. She was also shut out of a "WandaVision" watch-party club because a member blocked her.
What is Clubhouse?
The Clubhouse app is an invite-only audio app that is available on iOS and recently went into beta for US users of Android. The app can be used on iPad, but it is not optimized for iPadOS, so the app will appear in a small window, or looking at it in a zoomed-in size, according to PCMag.
The overall hype around the platform, which attracted more than 10 million users in its first year, has started to fizzle out. It only recently released a version for Android devices, and new users can only join when invited by a current user.
Aside from that, Twitter's audio chat platform called Spaces is slowly taking over, and it seems that Clubhouse may be in for a challenge.
The platform has not introduced other new features, and there are no new updates yet to entice more users to download the app.
Related Article : What is Clubhouse Social Media and Why is it Famous Among Celebrities? FAQs Answered
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Written by Sophie Webster
