Monday Memo #81: Stanford-Alumni-Founded App Clubhouse Explodes in Popularity
By Noah Howard and Jackson Vachal
Start your week off right, with a round-up of Stanford-related news from Stanford Politics.
Stanford Alumni-Founded App Clubhouse Explodes in Popularity
Over the past month more than four million people downloaded Clubhouse, an eleven month old social media app that lets users congregate in a dizzying array of audio chat rooms. With only several thousand users last spring, the invite-only platform has garnered a number of celebrity users like Elon Musk, Ai Weiwei, and Oprah Winfrey. As its membership grows, Clubhouse has become a forum for discussions about politics and free speech, gaining the attention of governments and companies worldwide. The app was created in March 2020 by two Stanford alumni, serial tech entrepreneurs Paul Davison and Rohan Seth. Based in San Francisco, the company raised more than $100 million dollars in venture capital this past month, achieving a $1 billion valuation despite having only a dozen employees. Clubhouse’s massive surge in popularity has left its small team struggling to keep up with demand, while established social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have begun developing competing products. The app’s audio-based conversation structure is unique among popular online media platforms, sparking discussion about the future of social media. Some high-profile Clubhouse users have already garnered millions of followers and the app’s thousands of chat rooms span topics from astrophysics to poetry to geopolitics. In China, the app was a brief but significant space for political discourse before the country’s censors banned it earlier this month. At the same time, the platform is dealing with complaints about harassment, misinformation, and data privacy. The Stanford Internet Observatory has confirmed that a Chinese company called Agora provides data services for Clubhouse, raising the possibility of Chinese government surveillance of the app.
The Trouble with Democrats’ Impeachment Strategy
As the second impeachment trial of President Trump came to a close, pundits on both sides of the political spectrum put forth their opinions as to how the Democrats could have formed a stronger case against the former president. One such individual, Michael W. McConnell, the director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School and former Federal Appeals Court Judge, counseled that Democrats should have framed their charges in a much broader context. Drawing on the Federalist Papers, McConnell said that the primary charge in this impeachment should have been Trump’s abuse and violation of public trust in trying to overturn the election instead of incitement of insurrection. In doing so, McConnell argued that this would have enabled Democrats to cite Trump’s pressuring of the Georgia Secretary of State to overturn the state’s election results. Moreover, Democrats could have mentioned Trump’s dereliction of duty in not mobilizing troops to defend the Capitol or telling his supporters that he strongly condemned their actions. While McConnell concedes that it is unlikely these changes would have changed the result of the Senate trial, he contends that it definitely would have made it significantly harder for Senators to justify acquittal.
Biden’s Troubled Path to Engagement with China
Balancing human rights concerns with a desire for cooperation on issues of global importance has long been a hallmark of dealings between American presidents and Chinese leaders. However, with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo labeling China’s persecution of its Uyghur minority a genocide, President Biden will face a host of new challenges in managing the world’s most important bilateral relationship. In using the term genocide, Biden’s administration has risked diluting the severity of the charge, as, historically, any country affixed with that label has immediately become the target of strict sanctions. In addition, scholars debate whether the term genocide is even appropriate in the case of China’s treatment of its Uyghur population with experts pointing out the lack of a systematized regime of mass murder. Beth Van Schaak, a professor of human rights at Stanford Law School, points out that China’s government would most likely not engage in actions so brazen as mass murder but would adopt a slow methodical approach taking place over multiple generations. Moreover, such a method may be seen in the forced sterilization of Uyghur women and the theft of Uyghur children from their parents. In response, China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, has indicated that interference in matters relating to Xinjiang and Hong Kong constitute a “red line” in its relationship with the United States. Elizabeth Economy, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute, has argued that, concerning climate change and other areas of mutual interest, China has already adopted a leadership role and so will likely feel pressured not to surrender the initiative on these issues. In doing so, Economy suggests that the United States need not take a softer approach concerning human rights to solicit cooperation from Beijing on global issues.
And in case you missed it...
How Long Can Democracy Survive QAnon and Its Allies? (Edsall | The New York Times)
After Wuhan mission on pandemic origins, WHO team dismisses lab leak theory (Shih and Rauhala | The Washington Post)
800 Laptops Stolen from School of Humanities and Sciences (Espinosa | The Stanford Daily)
Myanmar coup: A major setback, but the story of Myanmar’s struggle for democracy is not over, says former U.S. ambassador to Myanmar and Stanford visiting scholar (de Witte | Stanford University News)
Rep. Mondaire Jones, one of the first Black openly gay members of Congress, has become the role model he’d never had (Williams | The Washington Post)
About the Authors
Noah Howard ’22 is pursuing majors in Economics and International Relations with a minor in Iranian Studies. Living in Washington D.C., he is currently writing a thesis about the role of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard in Iranian Politics.
Jackson Vachal ’22 is pursuing majors in Political Science and Philosophy, with a focus on democratic theory. A San Francisco native, he is interested in social entrepreneurship and nonprofit advocacy work.
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