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.”
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.
It’s so common for “anti-censorship” to be code for “Nazi-friendly” that I’m immediately suspicious of any platform that uses that as a selling point.
Well, plus the fact that it’s a closed source nonfederated system, so it’s just a case of “from the frying pan into another, slightly cooler frying pan”
In this case, the Nazis are the ones doing the censoring on TikTok in the first place
Agreed. Some censorship is good. Just like some regulation is good in any industry. Otherwise, the worst of the worst will destroy it with propaganda and hate. Censorship of things that are meant solely to hurt others or to spread misinformation are needed.
Exactly. It’s been proven time and time again that if you have absolutely zero moderation except for blatantly illegal content, you’ll eventually be running a Nazi bar.
Although in UpScrolled’s case, I’m not sure if they weren’t explicitly out to build a Nazi bar since they do seem to have a huge Nazi and antisemitism problem (well, problem for anyone who’s not a Nazi anyhow) and they’ve apparently mass-banned trans people. So this profusion of Nazis might be a “it’s a feature and not a bug” scenario, even though their TOS seemingly disallows hate speech.
Also, for an “anti-censorship” platform it’s funny that they ban any kind of “adult” content.
i don’t know if it’s a function of the ideological bent or just because the gigantic influx of users has totally swamped their moderation, but yes it does have problems with fascists as of writing
@alyaza @jaennaet It was having problems with this within a week of launch (source: I downloaded it within a week of launch and saw/reported more than one Holocaust denialism post/commenter in that time before I closed the app). So they may be being overloaded again, but from what I heard they hadn’t even implemented basic username filtering before this next wave. I didn’t say anything at the time bc it was new and I wanted to believe they meant well, but it’s been 6 months…
Gee whiz, imagine my surprise
Edit: they’re ostensibly banning trans people (“ostensibly” because it’s not like I can verify the claims, not that I don’t believe them), so I guess the “platforms shouldn’t get to decide who exists” platform has no problem deciding trans people “shouldn’t exist”?
A year ago this comment would have gotten deleted from nearly any subreddit. Today it’s recognized as fact.
I’m similarly suspicious, but it’s not just code for “nazi-friendly” but also crackpots, maladaptives, etc. Rational people who read and say “anti-censorship” in this context know it means that it’s not beholden to corporate or government interests. But everyone else seems to want to interpret that as “I can say whatever I want! How dare you mod anything I say?! Freeze-peach, y’all!”
I wish they’d pick a different term for these non-corporate alternatives, but I don’t have a better suggestion to offer right now.
In this case it seems quite reasonable for their stance to stem from the censorship of posts about palestine on popular social media platforms. Agreed we shouldn’t settle for any more privately owned social media regardless though.
Building a Nazi bar to make sure pro-Palestinian voices are heard seems like a suboptimal solution, though
For sure, Nazis (or their speech patterns anyway) do seem to be specifically against the policy as well though