The Harsh Reality that Comes with Social Media
Clubhouse Influencer Mario Nawfal sheds light on the instances of bullying he has encountered on the fast-growing platform
For some, social media is a great way to kill time, but for others, it’s a business, or an escape from reality. As “anti-reality” as it may seem, social media is no different than the world we know; you’ll find the good and the bad exactly as you would offline.

We’ve all heard of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok, but there’s a new platform that’s taking social media by storm right now—Clubhouse.

Clubhouse is an audio-only mobile app that allows you to connect with different people and start conversations inside a “room”. The networking potential of Clubhouse is huge, and it’s a great place to build relationships, discuss interests, and do business. The app has become insanely popular, as it reaches wider audiences every day.

Whether they’re using it to grow their personal brand, their business, or just for the fun of it, many of the Clubhouse “originals” have already generated a large following. One of the early adopters of Clubhouse was Mario Nawfal, a business owner and entrepreneur. As a business influencer with an already established personal brand on Instagram and LinkedIn, Nawfal saw potential in the platform and an opportunity to grow his brand even further.

Within a few weeks of joining, Nawfal was already one of the fastest-growing influencers on Clubhouse, with over 50,000 followers. His daily room “The Roundtable” hosts big names in business such as Tai Lopez, Naveen Jain and Jay Shetty. The Roundtable quickly became one of the biggest Clubhouse room, with thousands of listeners tuning in every day, earning a position as the #1 room in business and leading many to label Mario as the King of Clubhouse. Because Clubhouse is a very intimate platform, building connections moves at a much faster pace, which can in turn be a double-edged sword- leading users to making both friends and enemies on the platform very rapidly.

One occasion where this double-edged sword negatively affected Nawfal was when entrepreneur and investor Jason Calacanis joined one of the rooms in which Mario was a moderator. According to Nawfal, following a verbal disagreement with another moderator, Calacanis was moved back to the audience by a third moderator. Even though Nawfal was actually asleep during this altercation, Calacanis later began attacking Nawfal and some of the other moderators on his Twitter feed, describing them as a group of course-selling scammers and reportedly asked his followers to mass report Nawfal and the other moderators, which eventually led to Nawfal's Clubhouse account getting suspended without warning.

Clubhouse did not respond to my email and Nawfal's account remains suspended as of this article's publication.

It's very easy to have someone suspended on Clubhouse; it may only take 15 people reporting an account to have it automatically “temporarily” suspended. This raises questions about the platform’s algorithm and ability to deal with the ugly side of humanity. To have a big influencer suspended without investigation when their account is reported, is a major concern that the founders must address.

While Clubhouse has a banning and reporting system that is similar to other social media platforms, the problem that Clubhouse runs into is its inability to review the reported content on time. Due to their rapid growth, the team is short-staffed, leaving my unfairly suspended accounts still suspended awaiting the outcome of Clubhouse’s investigation.
As someone that follows Mario Nawfal on his social media accounts, I can say that he actually stands against “fake gurus” and scammers in the industry, and as far as I know, he has never sold a course or any info product in his life. While Jason Calacanis is a respected figure and there is no doubt about his intentions, situations like this can be harmful and can tarnish someone’s hard work and reputation within hours.

If there’s a deeper lesson to be learned today, it’s that bullying is all-too common on social media and a much deeper problem that requires more attention. New platforms such as Clubhouse must develop systems and processes to better deal with such issues and treat them with more importance.