Western social media apps including Twitter, Facebook and
YouTube are banned in China, where the local internet is tightly
censored to weed out content that could undermine the ruling
communist party.
The Clubhouse app, launched in early 2020, saw explosive growth
in user numbers earlier this month after Tesla CEO Elon Musk and
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev held a surprise discussion on the
platform.
Its chat rooms are only accessible via invites from current
members, and as of Sunday, invites to the platform were selling
for between 50-400 yuan ($7.73 - $69.59) on popular Chinese
e-commerce sites.
Reuters directly observed several Chinese-language 'club'
conversations where thousands of users listened to wide-ranging
audio discussions covering topics including Xinjiang detention
camps, Taiwan independence and Hong Kong's National Security
Law.
China's cyber authorities have become increasingly strict in
recent years, widening the scope of apps, media outlets and
social media sites banned in the country.
While Clubhouse remains uncensored, it is only available on iOS
devices and is unavailable in the local Apple app store, both
major barriers for its widespread use in China.
Mainland Chinese users can access the app by modifying the
location of their app store.
It's unclear why the app remains unblocked in China, though some
foreign social sites with small Chinese followings manage to
operate under the radar of censors, including 8kun, a central
hub for QAnon followers.
In one club chat centred on Hong Kong politics, activists,
journalists and artists discussed former U.S. president Trump
and his support base in the former colony.
Another popular Chinese language club on the site as of Saturday
involved a rare open exchange between netizens in mainland
China, Taiwan and Hong Kong over heightened political tensions
in the region.
The discussion became a hot topic on China's own Twitter-like
social media site Weibo on Saturday.
"I don't know how long this environment can last", said one user
in a popular Weibo post that was liked over 65,000 times. "But I
will definitely remember this moment in Internet history."
($1 = 6.4664 Chinese yuan renminbi)
(Reporting by Cate Cadell and Pei Li, additional reporting by
Jessie Pang in Hong Kong; Editing by Kim Coghill)
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