by RINA CHANDRAN
The company’s CEO says users are flooding the platform after the sale of TikTok in the U.S.
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.
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