Chinese users looking for a platform to freely discuss taboo topics like the mass detention of Uighur Muslims and the Hong Kong protests flocked to the Clubhouse app, which suddenly saw a spike in popularity last week. However, as of Monday night, the app appears to have been blocked for Chinese users.
Authoritarian China deploys a vast and sophisticated surveillance state to scrub the internet of dissent and prevent citizens from accessing international social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.
But the Clubhouse app had for a brief while side-stepped the censors and drawn crowds of Chinese internet users – but appeared to quickly fall foul of the censors.
The American invite-only audio app allows users to listen and participate in loosely moderated live conversations in digital "rooms."
By Monday night, however, the app showed an error message to users without a VPN to establish a secure connection, and Chinese-language rooms quickly turned to the discussion over the app's ban.
Top trending groups turned to topics about the ban, and some Chinese-speaking users began to discuss the security implications of being on the app and whether they would face official monitoring.
