Clubhouse — the iPhone-exclusive social media app — has become quite the talk of the tech town with even celebrities flocking to it. Tesla Elon Musk is said to hold a conversation with Kanye West on Clubhouse. And ‘Brad Pitt’ too joined in. Except it wasn’t the real Brad Pitt.
According to a report by Forbes, it was a New York-based photographer Jacob Tran who used the handle Brad Pitt. “I didn’t really have intentions to troll I just, I’m a person who grew up gaming, so I would just get like the shortest usernames, or like usernames that were dictionary words. So I grabbed @bradpitt,” he told Forbes. Interestingly, one of his friend used the handle Quentin Tarantino.
People on Clubhouse, however, thought that it was the real Brad Pitt. “People were joining and I was kind of just looking through people’s bios,” Tran said. “I saw the craziest people were following me, like actors or notable people,” he added.
One of the conversations turned to climate change, which led to people tweeting that Brad Pitt was hosting a discussion on climate change on Clubhouse. At one point, there were 3,100 concurrent users in one of the rooms on Clubhouse Tran was in.
Clubhouse has a policy that violates it terms of service if a person is found impersonating someone else. When Tran revealed that he is not Brad Pitt, his account was swiftly banned. Tran told Forbes that he didn’t want to troll nor did he create the account as a joke. He said that he didn’t expect to it to grow and just wanted to see “see what would happen, hoping good conversations would happen,” Tran said.