Users and experts reveal Clubhouse's content moderation struggles in India, amid a deluge of 18+ rooms, adult content, harassment and bullying on the platform
Moneycontrol pieced this story from conversations with nearly a dozen people who are users, creators, psychologists, industry experts, and civil society organisations. Tweets: @kpswathi , @chandrarsrikant , @revathirajeevan , @kpswathi , @chandrarsrikant , and @kpswathi . Thanks: @tsuvik Tweets: Swathi Moorthy / @kpswathi : “What happens in Clubhouse does not stay in Clubhouse.” A lot of times, difference of opinion and having little too much fun spills over to other platforms, where users are stalked and harassed, that may or may not led to serious consequences. https://www.moneycontrol.com/ ... Chandra R. Srikanth / @chandrarsrikant : Clubhouse India is fast morphing into porn hub. @kpswathi spoke to users, creators, psychologists, industry experts, and civil society organisations. Clubhouse is struggling to get moderation right, even after millions of downloads, and is facing an uphill task to stay relevant https://twitter.com/... Revathi Rajeevan / @revathirajeevan : Porn, bullying and body-part auctions: Inside Clubhouse India's content moderation struggles A very important story by @kpswathi https://www.moneycontrol.com/ ... Swathi Moorthy / @kpswathi : If you have been using @Clubhouse, bunch of 18+ rooms, dubbed red rooms, porn rooms etc. No surprises there. But the Clubhouse content moderation problem extends far beyond tackling them. https://www.moneycontrol.com/ ... Chandra R. Srikanth / @chandrarsrikant : 🚨🆕️ Slowing growth apart, Clubhouse faces a deluge of 18+ rooms, adult content, and bullying it is unable to keep a lid on. Upset users are now turning their backs on the platform. @kpswathi with this excellent, important story. Must read https://www.moneycontrol.com/ ... Swathi Moorthy / @kpswathi : Raj Pagariya of Cyber Blog India, which helps cybercrime victims, said they has been receiving complaints since June for harassment on platform. It is difficult to file complaints since not many know how live audio social networks work. In many cases, police refused to even file. Thanks: @tsuvik
Context & Ripple Effects
Clubhouse's moderation problems are not new — Bloomberg flagged homophobia, anti-Semitism, and harassment in its rooms back in January, and a conversation that devolved into anti-Semitic comments in 2020 drew early controversy. What the Moneycontrol reporting adds is the Indian ground truth: Cyber Blog India has logged harassment complaints since June, and police often refuse to file them because complainants and officers alike don't understand how live audio networks work.
The India findings land on top of an existing trust deficit — women users documented how the block feature enables tactical silencing and intimidation months earlier — and on a platform whose growth story rests on markets like China and the Middle East, where users prize it as a rare open forum. If the free-speech appeal curdles into an unsafe-space reputation, the same openness that drove adoption becomes the liability.
First-order effects
- Indian users are abandoning the app, with Cyber Blog India receiving a steady stream of Clubhouse harassment complaints since June that the platform's own tools haven't resolved.
- Victims of harassment spilling onto other platforms find police in many cases refusing to file complaints, leaving them with no effective recourse.
Second-order effects
- The block-feature abuse documented by women users compounds the moderation failures, making the platform structurally harder to fix with tooling alone and raising the cost of retaining its most active creator base.
- Regulators and civil society organisations now have documented, named complaints to work from, shifting pressure from ad-hoc criticism toward formal scrutiny of how live audio platforms handle user safety in India.
Third-order effects
- If police and platforms alike lack the playbook for live-audio harm, the pattern points toward regulation and moderation norms written specifically for ephemeral audio — a category so far treated as an afterthought next to text and video.
- Trust becomes the gating resource for live audio's expansion: platforms that scale into new markets faster than they can moderate inherit the harassment load, and the open-forum positioning that won users in China and the Middle East becomes the same exposure India is now documenting.
The trend: Live audio platforms are discovering that real-time, unrecorded conversation outpaces their moderation tooling, turning openness from their growth engine into their core trust liability.