Within hours of the deal for TikTok’s U.S. operations being announced last week, Issam Hijazi noticed a big uptick in users to his social media platform UpScrolled. That stream of disgruntled users fleeing TikTok over censorship concerns turned into a flood this week, crashing UpScrolled’s servers.
UpScrolled, launched last July, supports text posts, photos, short-form videos, stories and other features. It claims to be a platform with “no censorship” and “no shadowbans.” On Monday, it ranked among the top 10 free apps on Apple’s App Store, and No. 2 among social network apps. It hit more than 1 million users from just 40,000.
“You all showed up so fast our servers tapped out,” UpScrolled said in an Instagram post on Monday. “We’re a tiny team building an alternative to the platforms that stopped listening to you. Right now, we’re scaling and running on caffeine to keep up with what YOU started. Bear with us. We’re on it.”
Under the deal for TikTok’s operations, three managing investors control 50% of the new U.S. entity: Oracle Corp., private equity firm Silver Lake Management, and Abu-Dhabi-based investment company MGX. Since the deal was finalized, #TikTokCensorship has been trending on other platforms, with users claiming that TikTok is suppressing or delaying videos about Palestine, as well as the fatal shooting in Minneapolis of a man by federal immigration officers.
UpScrolled is backed by the Tech for Palestine incubator, an advocacy project that helps fund tech initiatives to support the Palestinian cause. Hijazi, a Palestinian-Australian, spoke to Rest of World on the sidelines of a conference on Saturday.
You saw a big jump in users after the TikTok deal was done. Why do you think that happened?
With the deal being signed, people thought, okay, that’s it, we’re not going to be on TikTok anymore. Content moderation on TikTok is gonna change. It has already changed. I know a lot of pro-Palestinians began to get warnings; began to see their content being moderated. Their reach has been really suppressed. This started a long time ago, but it has been more severe in the past few days. In the past few days, we grew by 30,000-40,000 users. Most users are in the U.S, followed by Europe, UK, Australia, with the rest from everywhere else.
What led you to build UpScrolled?
I worked for big tech companies. And then the genocide began [the Israeli offensive following the October 7, 2023 attack by Palestinian militant group Hamas was declared a genocide by a United Nations commission]. I couldn’t take it anymore. I lost family members in Gaza, and I didn’t want to be complicit. So I was like, I’m done with this, I want to feel useful. I found this gap in the market, with a lot of people asking why there is no alternative to the Big Tech platforms for their content, which was getting censored. So I thought, why don’t we build our own? I just rolled up my sleeves, and built it.
How is the content moderation policy on UpScrolled different from the other platforms?
We moderate anything that is illegal. Like, you cannot sell drugs. But if you want to speak about Palestine, or something else, you’re free to do it. The difference is that we don’t selectively censor groups or people, unlike other platforms. The other platforms claim to be free speech platforms. But when it comes to anything on Palestine, that’s a different story. On a social media platform – you have all the problems of the world in one place, literally. So you need content moderation, and it’s the law. But it’s also about transparency, and ethics, and treating everyone equally. So as long as it’s legal, it can exist on our platform.
I’ll be lying to you if I tell you I know the answer. We’re learning as we grow. But one thing that we’ve learned is that people want to feel seen, and feel like they are not the product for big corporations. We’re not here to keep you addicted to scrolling. We are a platform where we want to connect people. We’re not employing algorithms just for the sake of keeping you hooked on the platform. And this is by design. It’s not because we don’t know how: it is very easy to design the algorithms to do that. But I don’t want to do that because I know the effect it can have on people, mentally, especially the younger generation. So it will take time, and it’s not easy. But personally, I’m very hopeful. There’s a global shift, there is an awakening, and people are looking for alternatives. So I’m counting on that.