Harvard journalism institute laments inability to 'fact check' Clubhouse, praises Chinese censorship

Nieman Labs, the top journalism institute at Harvard University, shared an article to Twitter on Thursday lamenting the difficulty of "fact checking" content which appears on the social media app Clubhouse.

"Writing for online outlet GritDaily, Olivia Smith warned that on Clubhouse, 'there’s no path to accountability,'" the article reads. "She cited the fact that the app doesn't keep old posts or audio files and doesn't allow users to record conversations. 'There is no way to prove that someone said anything controversial at all,' Smith wrote."

The article goes on to explain that since the Communist Party of China censors Clubhouse, journalists in the west should also be concerned about it.

"If Xi Jinping's administration isn’t ignoring Clubhouse, why should fact-checkers? Why should you?" the article asks rhetorically.

The article comes a few days after a journalist from The New York Times came under fire for lying about the content of a conversation she had infiltrated on the app. The journalist, Taylor Lorenz, falsely accused tech entrepreneur Marc Andreesen of using the term "retard" in a conversation on the app.

As it turns out, a woman who was also in the call used the term to describe how users of the subreddit r/WallStreetBets referred to themselves during the short squeeze of GameStop. She noted that the users referred to themselves as "retard army," and that was the extent of the term's usage in the conversation.

When Lorenz was called out for lying about the content of the conversation, she thanked the corrector for the "clarification" but did not admit that she lied. She later changed her Twitter account settings to private.

Human rights journalist Glenn Greenwald has sharply criticized mainstream journalists for their treatment of Clubhouse, arguing that their "'reporting' consists of out-of-context statements designed to make the participants look bigoted, insensitive, or otherwise guilty of bad behavior."

"In other words, journalists, desperate for content, have flagged Clubhouse as a new frontier for their slimy work as voluntary hall monitors and speech police," Greenwald wrote.