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A man uses a tablet device in a subway train in Moscow in 2019. Russia's Internet regulatory agency announced it is slowing Twitter because the company has ignored requests to remove content harmful to children. Pavel Golovkin/AP hide caption

A man uses a tablet device in a subway train in Moscow in 2019. Russia's Internet regulatory agency announced it is slowing Twitter because the company has ignored requests to remove content harmful to children.

MOSCOW - The Kremlin is threatening to block Twitter in Russia as President Vladimir Putin seeks to rein in the influence of social media.

In a statement, Russia's Internet regulatory agency, Roskomnadzor, said that for now it will be slowing down Twitter service because the company has allegedly ignored requests to take down material harmful to children.

Social media companies, regardless of country of origin, are coming under increasing scrutiny by the Kremlin, which views them as rivals to the dominant state-run news outlets. In January, Roskomnadzor said social media - including Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Russia's VKontakte - faced fines for inciting minors to take part in unauthorized rallies demanding the release of imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

Twitter's presence in Russia is relatively small, with just 3% of respondents in a recent poll saying they use the microblog. But the head of Navalny's Moscow office, Oleg Stepanov, tweeted that the Twitter slowdown was just the start of a "large-scale offensive" by authorities to assert control over - and ultimately block - social media.

Andrei Svintsov, a member of the committee on informational policy in the Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament, told a Moscow radio station that Twitter was targeted exactly because it's not widely used in Russia and the slowdown will therefore have a minimal impact.

"Of course it will serve as an example to all the others who don't observe Russian legislation," Svintsov said.

Roskomnadzor claimed that since 2017, Twitter disregarded more than 28,000 requests to delete content that encourages minors to commit suicide, contains child pornography or provides information on drug use. If Twitter fails to comply, the agency said, it could be blocked in Russia.

Later, the agency clarified that the slowdown would affect photo and video content but not text.

In a statement, a Twitter spokesperson said the content which Roskomnadzor claims appears on the platform is not permitted under the company's rules.

"We remain committed to advocating for the Open Internet around the world and deeply concerned by increased attempts to block and throttle online public conversation," the statement said.

The Kremlin has repeatedly used the protection of minors as a pretext to limit free expression. At a meeting with young people last week, Putin said that tech companies had to follow the "moral laws of our society" or Russian society would collapse.

In December, Putin signed a law that would let the Russian government block social media that "censor" Russian news outlets. This week, the speaker of the Duma said new laws were necessary to guarantee the country's "digital sovereignty."

A complete ban on a social media platform would not be unprecedented. In 2016, the authorities blocked LinkedIn, the U.S.-based platform for professional networking, for not storing data on Russian citizens on Russia-based servers, as stipulated by law.

But the Russian government's years-long efforts to block the messaging app Telegram failed because of technical difficulties.

Putin's spokesman told reporters that the authorities had gained valuable experience trying to shut down Telegram.

Not long after the Twitter slowdown was announced, a number of government websites, including the Kremlin's, went down.

Andrei Soldatov, an expert on the Russian Internet with the Center for European Policy Analysis, says that the Twitter slowdown accidentally caused the sites to go down as authorities were testing technology to limit Internet access.

The Ministry of Digital Development blamed the outage on technical issues unrelated to the Twitter slowdown.

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Russia Slows And Threatens To Block Twitter - NPR

When Dan lost his job due to COVID-19, he found an unlikely income stream: selling invites to a new social media platform.

The app is called Clubhouse and looks very different to Instagram or TikTok or Twitter, with their bright feeds of videos and photos and pithy wordplay.

Clubhouse is slower and stranger. It's audio-only; no photos to be seen, except those on user profiles.

Using Clubhouse is like listening to a podcast, but live. Or like being part of a very exclusive conference, one with celebrities.

The conversations cannot be recorded within the app, which seems to loosen people up and encourage them to speak more freely.

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If you aren't in the room to hear them talk, you'll miss out forever.

And to get in the room, you have to get on the app, which is invitation only.

Most members have only been given a handful of invites to share, but Dan was among the first to sign up to the app. He had heaps. Fresh out of work, he saw a chance to make an easy buck.

For the past three months, he's been selling up to 80 invites a day, mostly through Reddit.

"Demand has been massive," he told the ABC via email from the United States.

"I joined Clubhouse very early so I have unlimited invites."

At $US30 a pop, he's made $54,000.

For a measure of the buzz around Clubhouse, Dan's $54,000 is a good place to start.

Launched in April last year, Clubhouse is being spruiked as "the next big thing" in social media.

It's currently riding a wave of media hype, celebrity endorsements, venture capital and chart-topping download figures. The number of active weekly users has increased more than 1,500 per cent to 10 million in the past few months.

But probably the most obvious sign of Clubhouse's success is the fact Instagram and Twitter are launching their own clone versions similar to the way Instagram brought out Reels last year to take on TikTok's popularity in short-form video.

Supplied: Clubhouse

Clubhouse has been described as a cross between a conference call, talkback radio and the video-chat platform Houseparty.

Others call it a hybrid of Twitter and TED Talks.

Once you've logged in, you're brought to the "hallway", a collection of different chat rooms with their topics and list of speakers/listeners on display.

The "conversation rooms" off this "hallway" look much the same as an audio-only conference call. Unlike most calls, however, not everyone gets to speak.

Digital artworks called NFTs are selling for thousands, even millions of dollars. Is this a bubble or a new way for artists to finally get paid for digital art?

Generally, there are many more people listening than have been given access to the mic. Each conversation room can fit up to 5,000.

After the conversation is over, the room is closed. There's no recording through the app (though some users find ways around this).

And that's Clubhouse. The platform is pretty basic, but users appear to like it.

Some go to the platform for a sneak preview of an upcoming musical (The Lion King did this in November), or to hop into a room with a favourite celebrity.

Others are chasing fame and exposure. Many of the rooms are dedicated to making money from tech, including by investing in cryptocurrency schemes or non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Think of it as a vast and sprawling, never-ending conference with no particular focus.

Topics can range from the frivolous to the serious.

Last month the Chinese government banned the app after thousands shared stories of "re-education camps" and the Tiananmen Square massacre.

According to Crystal Abidin, a digital anthropologist at Curtin University, Clubhouse's popularity is a product of the pandemic.

In an age of working from home, where furniture outlets are selling fake bookshelves to make people look good on Zoom calls, audio-only is a relief.

And at a time when social events are easily accessible online, through platforms like Facebook or Eventbrite, talks on Clubhouse are harder to access, and therefore offer the excitement of attending something exclusive.

"Clubhouse came about and said, 'Hey, this is audio only. No need for video we're only going to hear your voice,'" Dr Abidin said.

"It feels like Clubhouse is taking away from all that Zoom fatigue."

The fact the spoken conversations cannot be easily recorded or archived adds to this sense of exclusivity.

"You tune in now or you tune in never," Dr Abidin said.

Clubhouse essentially trades on FOMO the fear of missing out.

"Right now, it's like a gentlemen's club or an insider's club that only people who are very invested in would seek out," Dr Abidin said.

Guilherme, a Portugal-based Clubhouse invite seller on Reddit, said he believed most of his customers (paying about $US15 per invite) were wannabe tech entrepreneurs.

The app can sometimes feel like a version of TV shows like Dragon's Den or Shark Tank, where entrepreneurs make business presentations to a panel of wealthy investors who decide whether to invest in their company.

"It's new and people don't want to miss the hype train," Guilherme said.

"Eighty per cent of rooms are entrepreneurs who tell their stories about how to make money."

If Guilherme is right, there's a strange circularity to the fact that people who lost their jobs due to COVID are making a buck selling invites to wealth seminars.

One of the Reddit sellers told the ABC: "I lost my part-time job as a bartender. I am a college student from middle Europe."

Another said: "I'm not really making much, but money is money."

Of course, staying exclusive while being popular will not be easy.

As downloads soar, the influx of new members could gradually dilute the qualities that made the app popular in the first place, Dr Abidin said.

"Now everyone and their parents are on Clubhouse."

For most of last year, the app kept a relatively low profile a preserve of the Silicon Valley elite.

This changed on January 31, 2021, when Elon Musk interviewed the chief executive officer of Robinhood on Clubhouse at the height of the GameStop saga, grilling him on why his company had stopped some share trades. The 5,000-person conversation room filled up. One user streamed it to YouTube, where the video has been watched millions of times.

Getty Images: Britta Pedersen

Guilherme, the invite seller, noticed the Musk interview coincided with an increase in demand for Clubhouse invites.

"That was the real boom," he said.

Other sellers report selling as many invites as they could supply.

For what it's worth, Dan the invite mogul says demand has slowed in the past week.

He's only sold 20 invites a day, down from 80.

"That could be for a lot of reasons. Like Bitcoin, Clubhouse runs hot and cold," he said.

According to data from the analytics company Sensor Tower, Clubhouse downloads are still going strong. It's the eighth-ranked free social networking app on Apple's app store, down from a peak of third, but still high.

In Australia, Clubhouse is ranked ninth.

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But the app stores are littered with apps that do well at first and then ultimately fail to break into the mainstream.

MeWe, for example, was spruiked in the mid-noughties as an alternative to Facebook. It failed at that, but survived by retaining a core group of users (generally people from the far right who believe in conspiracy theories).

Perhaps once the COVID lockdowns lift in different parts of the world and people are spending less time online, Clubhouse will become more of a niche professional platform something like an audio-only version of LinkedIn.

Another scenario is sex work: audio-only conversations are harder to moderate than text-based ones, which can be more easily ready by machines.

"Deep down, I feel like at some point this is just going to be used for the online exchange of sexual services," Dr Abidin said.

"Sex has been deplatformed from so many apps of late and these groups of workers just need a place to go. This could be a really good space for that to happen.

"We'll see if that ever comes here."

Get all the latest science stories from across the ABC.

Originally posted here:
What is Clubhouse? The invite-only social media platform that people are paying to join - ABC News

Chat startup Discord Inc. has ridden a surge in popularity to soaring revenue and a lofty valuation despite lacking the one thing found on most successful social-networking platforms: advertising. Its chief executive says dont expect that to change.

Discord nearly tripled its revenue last year solely by selling subscription access to exclusive perks for users. By contrast, the companies behind other free online hangoutsincluding Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc. and Snap Inc. primarily sell targeted ads built around sharing users personal information.

In an interview, Discord co-founder and CEO Jason Citron, 36 years old, said the company has balked at the advertising model favored by its peers because ads would be too intrusive. People use Discord to hold conversations in real time, he said, as opposed to passively reading, making or commenting on posts. He also said he thinks that consumers in general dislike adsand dont want their data shared with brands.

We really believe we can build products that make Discord more fun and that people will pay for them. It keeps our incentives aligned, he said.

For a startup like Discord, trying to monetize through ads would be difficult, analyst Mark Shmulik with AB Bernstein said. Youre then competing with the big incumbents in Google, Facebook and the other social platforms for ad dollars and thats no easy task, he said. It is a heavy lift.

Continued here:
What Is Everybody Doing on Discord? - The Wall Street Journal

Words by Chloe Karis

Social media and music might have a bit of a contentious relationship at the best of times, but theres no denying that mastering the breadth of available platforms out there can prove to be incredibly beneficial to your own artistic interests.

From social media to streaming servers to video games, there is an opportunity for all artists to engage with a new platform for their music. Read on below to find out more about five popular platforms which are allowing artists to chart, promote, perform and engage with their audience all through an online platform.

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While it was beginning to pop off in a big way throughout 2019, TikTok became majorly popular in 2020 due to lockdown, where everyone had the time to download the app and create content. Similar to what Vine once was, TikTok is a social media app with only short videos between 15 seconds to a minute long.

The new platform has shaped the way artist can now chart across the world. For instance, TikTok creator Nathan Apodaca uploaded a video of him lip-syncing to Dreams by Fleetwood Mac while riding on a skateboard drinking cranberry juice. This became the next trend on TikTok with thousands of creators doing a similar video.

The band later joined the trend with Mick Fleetwood and Stevie Nicks doing a video each. Dreams shot back in the charts worldwide, with the song reaching its new peak on the ARIA Charts at #4. Not only did the song rise in the charts, but Rumours also rose in the album charts reaching #9 in the last week of October last year.

New to Tiktok, John Mayer has taken advantage of the app in another way. He has uploaded videos of him giving guitar tips for his song Neon or the theory for his song Slow Dancing in a Burning Room.

He has also uploaded a TikTok of him playing guitar which allows the viewers to collaborate with him on the app and to do their own guitar solo during certain parts of the video. The more users who collab with him on this TikTok, the more exposure John Mayer gets through the app.

Clubhouse is audio-only and is currently an exclusive invite-only app. You can join in a chat and hear what other people are talking about or join in a call and share your own thoughts. Users can create their own topics to make a room to allow others to join with a similar interest.

But how does this app help artists? A User of Clubhouse has shared topic rooms with some rooms allowing artists to grow their network, connection and community. Networking virtually allows artists to easily grow their team with a manager, photographer, producer and more.

Artists can have exposure and share their talent through chat rooms which allow auditions, performances, or artist vs. artist battles. Some rooms have been created to allow artists to get advice and help with people sharing their personal experiences. So far, we know artists like Drake, 21 Savage, MC Hammer, E-40, Meek Mill and Questlove are on Clubhouse, while a little closer to home, theres a number of burgeoning rooms that are centric to the ins and outs of the Australian music scene.

From what we can tell, it seems like this exclusive app is going to continue growing and become more difficult to join the platform. We recommend to sign-up now and join the waitlist to be involved and have the opportunity to exposure of your work and build your network with other people on Clubhouse.

Discord allows its users to create or join a server to allow people to connect and chat through text, voice and video. Originally the software was to allow PC gamers to easily communicate while gaming online, but now Discord has expanded and is not just limited to those playing games. Every server is different with the server members, topics, rules and different channels to communicate on. Simply join via a link online or be invited to a server to start connecting with other members.

Each server allows several different chat rooms to be created to organise into topic-based chats. Head of the record label PC Music, A. G. Cook promoted his second studio album Apple on Discord. Through the platform, he attended listening parties and Q&As about songs via different chat rooms on his Discord server. Aside from promotion for his album, he has organised a battle of the bands which included up to 60 bands battling off.

Regarding how Discord can help musicians, selected server chat rooms can consist of new artists or producers meeting each other and growing their connection and network. Some servers allow promotion and feedback on their work.

Producer Kenny Beats created a server for other producers and songwriters to allow everyone to share their ideas and receive instant feedback from those online. Kenny Beats Discord community came together and bought another member a bass guitar and production plug-in to allow them to write and record their music.

Twitch is originally known as a video gaming livestream platform which allows creators to livestream and connect with their followers. Though the more Twitch grew, the more creators used the platform for reasons other than gaming. With Twitch now having a music section, it has allowed smaller upcoming musicians or producers to have easy exposure to viewers who are interested in music. This can also allow other creators to communicate with each other for a possible collaboration.

Australian independent record label, Future Classic, which has allowed their Twitch to livestream other creators to gain exposure and to allow viewers to learn, engage and discover the creative process of some musicians and producers. Recently Minnesota pop band, Vansire was on Future Classics Twitch channel who was creating music and allowing viewers to learn on the spot.

While they were livestreaming themselves recording an instrument, the video showed the viewers Vansire using FL Studio to produce the music they were live recording on. Not only this, but Future Classic have streamed interviews or talks from Dev Hynes, Bedouine and more, streamed live acts and last year they streamed Flumes 2019 Red Rocks performance in Colorado. They have also been re-streaming Hayden James DJ act every Saturday.

Artists have used the platform to do a livestream of a home concert for their fans to engage with while live shows were not permitted due to COVID. A Swedish band, Peter Bjorn and John livestreamed on Twitch a 36-hour festival called 36h Ingrid last year in March in their studio. 31 different artists went to their studio to do their own live performance between 30 minutes to two hours.

Minecraft is a never-ending building block game available on most consoles and devices. In other words, Minecraft is just a video game version of Lego. Every world created is different from the Minecraft website saying, prepare for an adventure of limitless possibilities as you build, mine, battle mobs, and explore the ever-changing Minecraft landscape. Needless to say, it is another game musicians can take advantage of in their own way to promote themselves.

Once again due to the pandemic, online concerts whether its through streaming or video games became the only way to attend a live show in 2020. Though Minecraft live concerts were a thing before the pandemic, more musicians have jumped on board with the idea.

In April last year, American music duo 100 gecs announced an online festival called Square Garden with Charli XCX, A.G. Cook, Cashmere Cat, Kero Kero Bonito and benny blanco set to perform. Instead of a normal venue you expect to see festivals at, Square Garden was set inside of a tree with each act getting the same stage set up and set times.

The Open Pit organisers spoke to Pitchfork explaining how Minecraft is a great platform for virtual events. One of the organisers, Eden Segal-Grossman said, its worked really well for us in terms of being able to build these absurd, crazy virtual words that you cant find anywhere else. Minecraft is also one of the best-selling games of all time so most people would have at least heard of it.

Melbourne based artist, Woods released her debut album Crystal Ball in October last year in collaboration with Minecraft and Twitch launch the album. Twitch was used to livestream the private Minecraft world up until the album was released.

While Minecraft users had the chance to interact with Woodes to build their own villages and experience the Crystal Ball village to see the album exist within the game. Woodes and Adelaide content creator Reuben Gore (who made a Minecraft version of Splendour In The Grass) created the main village. See below the trailer which was uploaded prior to the launch.

Read more about the intersection between music and virtualplatforms here.

Read more here:
Twitch, TikTok + more: the five best social media platforms for musicians to use - Mixdown

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