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.
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.