The Big Interview: UpScrolled Founder Issam Hijazi on Building an Ethical Alternative to Big Tech Social Media
If you’ve never encountered UpScrolled before, here’s a quick introduction: it’s a social media platform functionally similar to major players like Instagram or TikTok. Users can share photos and short videos, follow other accounts, comment on posts, and grow their own audience. On the surface, this is nothing groundbreaking, right?
UpScrolled founder Issam Hijazi would argue otherwise. His young startup diverges from most Big Tech social platforms in several key, intentional ways: it serves users a traditional chronological feed, rather than one sorted by an algorithm designed to maximize engagement and keep users scrolling; it also promises it will never share user data with marketing firms or other commercial third parties. Most notably, Hijazi—who is of Palestinian descent—founded UpScrolled in direct response to widespread user claims that mainstream platforms censor or shadow-ban pro-Palestinian content. The platform explicitly vows to “never” secretly suppress user content, as long as it does not violate published community guidelines.
Beyond breaking longstanding Big Tech norms, Hijazi’s open, unapologetically ideological stance is extremely rare among Silicon Valley leaders. (During our conversation, he told me he personally ensured users cannot select Israel as a location tag when posting to the platform.) His approach has clearly resonated: when we first met in February, just eight months after UpScrolled launched, the platform had already amassed 2.5 million users, spiking in popularity after widespread user anxiety over TikTok’s deal with former President Trump to spin up a U.S.-based version controlled by American investors. At that point, Hijazi was still UpScrolled’s only full-time employee.
Today, UpScrolled counts more than 5 million users, and Hijazi has scrambled to scale his team to keep up with the platform’s explosive growth—especially around content moderation. Recently, the platform has come under fire from organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, which alleges UpScrolled does far too little to root out antisemitic and extremist content. Last week, I sat down with Hijazi for a wide-ranging conversation to ask him about those claims, and how his team is playing catch-up after its unprecedented growth. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Hi Issam, welcome to The Big Interview.
ISSAM HIJAZI: Hi Katie, thank you for having me.
KD: I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s start with your background—it’s really fascinating. You spent years working for major Big Tech companies, including IBM and Oracle, before launching this. Can you walk me through your career in tech, and how that experience shaped your views on the industry, and social media specifically?
**IH: I’ve worked in tech for 17 and a half years now, and I started coding when I was 12, so I’ve been immersed in IT and technology from a really young age. Over my career, like you mentioned, I worked for big names like Oracle, IBM, Hitachi, and also smaller startups. When you’re just starting out, landing a job at one of those big companies is a dream—every kid growing up in tech wants that. They’re great companies with impressive technology, and there’s so much opportunity to learn. But once you start to understand how these companies actually operate, you start to question if that’s really where you want to be. I started having that feeling about three years ago, and that’s what pushed me to want to build something new.
These big companies are complicit in terrible things happening around the world. Take the genocide in Gaza, for example: they supply technology, infrastructure, expertise, all of that, to countries like Israel, and enable them to carry out mass surveillance. Just working there made me feel personally complicit, and I knew I had to get out.**
KD: So when did you reach that breaking point, where you said “that’s it, I’m starting my own thing, I’m building UpScrolled”?
**IH: That happened when I started watching the genocide in Gaza unfold in real time on my screen. It completely changed how I see everything. It hit me really hard, not just because I’m Palestinian, but because I’m a human being. On top of that, I lost multiple family members in Gaza—cousins, extended family. It changed my whole perspective on life, work, people; it stripped away all the little excuses I’d been making.
In that moment, I knew I had to do something. I was lucky enough to be safe outside of Gaza, outside of Palestine, so I owed it to the people there to contribute something. I looked around and saw so many people trying to post about what was happening on mainstream social media, but they were getting shadow-banned, selectively censored. This was happening across every major platform.
That’s when I decided it was time to give people back control over how they express themselves. I did my research and saw there were a lot of people looking for alternatives to the big platforms, but there were no ethical, reliable options out there. So I decided to put every free hour I had, all of my personal resources—including all my savings—into building this platform.
It sounded crazy back then, it still sounds crazy if you ask me now. But I was determined to give it a shot. We launched UpScrolled in July 2025, and almost immediately, people started joining. Users were willing to switch, or even quit other platforms like Instagram, X, and TikTok entirely to use ours.**
KD: Walk me through how you designed UpScrolled’s user experience. Users can post text, photos, videos, comment, repost—what was your top priority when you were building the platform?
**IH: I wanted the experience to feel familiar. I didn’t want to build some totally new, unfamiliar interface that people would have to learn from scratch. If you’re switching from Instagram or X, for example, the app should feel almost identical in terms of how you use it, what you can do. That was intentional.
There’s no point in building a new social platform just for the sake of building one. I knew people would join UpScrolled for a specific reason: they’ve been silenced, they’ve been censored, they want out of the big tech they’ve used for the last 20 years. We have all the core features people need to connect with each other—there’s nothing revolutionary about the functionality on the surface. But behind the scenes, we’re very different from other platforms.**
KD: Let’s dive into that behind-the-scenes difference. You’ve said before that UpScrolled doesn’t use AI or algorithms to sort the content users see. What determines what I see when I open my feed? What’s the logic there?
IH: It’s a strictly chronological feed. That’s it.
KD: I love chronological feeds. So many platforms have completely abandoned them, it’s wild.
IH: Exactly! 20 years ago, chronological feeds were standard and we loved them. Then platforms started switching to algorithmic feeds because they said it would improve the user experience, but all it really did was hook us on low-value content to keep us scrolling. All you need is to follow the people, news outlets, and organizations you care about, and stay up to date with them. You don’t need an algorithm telling you what you want or like, or trying to influence you or change how you think.
KD: Let’s talk about the exponential growth you’ve had. What’s been good, what’s been bad, what’s the hardest challenge you’ve had to navigate?
**IH: Let’s go back to right after we launched in July. I haven’t slept properly since that day. It was just me, running everything. When you run a whole social media platform by yourself, there’s a million things to manage: infrastructure, user expectations, customer support, content moderation, making sure the app works on every device from Chinese brands to Japanese to American. You have to do marketing, you have to fundraise, put your own money in first to get capital to hire people.
My wife and our baby girl—she’s 21 months old now—we were living in Sydney. I told her, “I’m going to be crazy busy for the next few months, why don’t you go spend the summer in Jordan with your family, come back in September and hopefully things will be under control by then.” That never happened. I ended up having to travel to the U.S. and other countries to present UpScrolled at conferences and meetings with potential partners. Eventually I just told her, “Just stay in Jordan, I’ll come visit you when I can.” I didn’t see them for six whole months. That was a huge personal sacrifice, missing six months of this stage of my daughter’s life.**
KD: That’s so tough.
**IH: By January, things still didn’t get any easier. I knew about the TikTok U.S. deal, but I had no idea what was coming. I thought we’d pick up a few thousand extra users, that was it. Up until January 20, we only had about 150,000 users, and it was still just me running everything. It felt like a small tight-knit community, I even knew almost everyone on the platform personally.
The day the TikTok deal was officially signed, I was in the U.S. at an event in the Bay Area. Before I went onstage, I was checking our platform dashboards, and I saw something weird happening. I checked the app store rankings, and I saw UpScrolled jumping from like 150th, to 80th, to 60th, climbing all the way to the top of the charts. I thought, okay, something big is happening. At first it wasn’t scary, we just had tens of thousands of new users, I was excited, I was going to announce it from the stage. But after that event, things got completely crazy. Hundreds of thousands of people were signing up every day.
I started getting calls and emails from people saying, “Your app is number 10 in Australia, it’s top 10 in the UK.” I couldn’t believe it, it felt surreal. I never expected any of this. By the end of January, we had 2.5 million users, and it was still just me running everything.**
KD: Oh wow, that’s mind-blowing.
IH: I was getting invited to do interviews with every news outlet, people I’d never met were sliding into my DMs. Web Summit asked me to come to Qatar to give an opening day keynote. We announced the 2.5 million user milestone, and it’s just kept growing ever since. But as you can imagine, growth that fast brings a ton of challenges, I was putting out fires nonstop that whole period. Yeah, I haven’t gotten much sleep at all.
KD: The fact that you’ve slept at all sounds like a miracle. How many people have you hired now?
IH: We have about 25 people on the team now, covering engineering, brand communications, strategy, content moderation, HR, and internal project management. I had to build that team really quickly, so I relied on my professional network and referrals. I got really lucky, so many people reached out because they believe in UpScrolled’s mission.
KD: What’s been the hardest, most brutal learning experience through all of this? Is there a specific moment of failure, a nightmare day or hour that stands out?
IH: We have what you’d call a good problem to have: the unplanned exponential growth itself. It’s amazing that we grew this fast, but it brought a whole new set of challenges we never had time to prepare for. Suddenly we had to manage millions of users, and bad actors who deliberately try to break the platform—they attack it technically, and they post all kinds of harmful content on purpose, then take screenshots to send to reporters to discredit our mission and what we’re building. That’s been the biggest challenge by far, managing all these users and the content they post. You don’t run into these issues with most other businesses, but when you’re a user-generated content platform, this is just something you have to expect.
KD: How do you plan to make money long-term? What’s your monetization strategy?
**IH: We aren’t making any money right now. We’re backed by angel investors and VCs that share our values, and I’m extremely picky about who invests in UpScrolled, for obvious reasons. I want this platform to stay ethical, and stay true to our values forever.
When it comes to monetization, we’re looking at a few proven models that other platforms use, and we’ll probably adopt some of them. For example, verified accounts: users and organizations can get a blue check after verifying their identity by paying a small subscription fee. That’s one revenue stream. We could also add a marketplace feature, where small businesses can sell products directly on the platform, and we take a small commission. For content creators, we could add a subscription feature where followers pay creators directly to access their exclusive content, creators set their own price, and we take a small cut.
The third option is ads, but even with ads, we’ll be extremely selective about who can advertise on UpScrolled. We’ll only let ethical businesses advertise, and we’ll block any businesses we see as complicit in human rights abuses around the world. I think this will be a great space for small and medium businesses to find their audience, and we already have a huge audience for them.**
KD: You touched on content moderation earlier. Critics this year have flagged extremist and antisemitic content on UpScrolled, and the Anti-Defamation League released a strongly worded statement claiming the platform doesn’t have enough content moderation enforcement. How do you respond to those claims?
**IH: We’re a brand new platform. If you look at the big established platforms that have been around for 20 years, they still struggle with content moderation. You can still find tons of hate speech on their apps today, even though they say they don’t allow it. This is a problem every single social media platform faces, and we’re no exception. User-generated content always carries that risk, and we’re working every day to address it. As for the specific content ADL flagged, all of that has already been removed from the platform.
We do not allow hate speech of any kind. We don’t allow Islamophobia, antisemitism, or any hate against any group on this platform. We want to build a platform that’s safe for everyone to exist and speak freely, as long as you stay within legal boundaries, respect other people, and don’t make others afraid to talk about the issues that matter to them.
We’ve been steadily strengthening our systems for detecting harmful content over the last couple months, and we’ve significantly expanded our moderation team. Right now, we have zero backlog of unaddressed reports of harmful content. Bad actors will still try to post this kind of content, but we will keep fighting it, and removing it as fast as it comes up.**
KD: Are you mostly using human moderators, rather than AI that automates a lot of moderation work? How is your approach different from big platforms that automate most moderation?
**IH: Right now, most of the work is manual. Our moderation team gets reports, reviews them, and takes action according to our policies. Users can report any content they see, and they usually report bad content really fast, so we can catch harmful content pretty quickly.
As we scale, we’re doing internal R&D to integrate AI models that can detect potential harmful content, but they don’t make the final call. We want AI to flag content before it spreads widely, then have a human moderator make the final decision. For content that’s easy to identify, like non-consensual pornography, CSAM, or explicit hate speech, AI can flag it with high confidence, and it gets put into a quarantine queue for human review before it goes live to other users. If it doesn’t violate our policies, it gets published.
We will always have a human make the final decision, never an algorithm, and we always let users appeal any moderation decision and explain why we took a certain action.**
KD: Users have noticed that you can’t select Israel as a location tag for posts. Given how the company was founded around the issue of Palestine, is this a deliberate decision, and what’s your thinking behind it?
**IH: I personally coded that feature so Israel wouldn’t show up in the location dropdown. I’m Palestinian, I know exactly what happened to my family. My ancestors, my grandparents, lived in Palestine—they lived in Safad before 1948, and they were forced out, made homeless, and had to move from country to country looking for a new home. They went to Lebanon, then Syria, then ended up in Jordan. They tried to go back to other cities in Palestine, but that wasn’t allowed, so they stayed in Jordan, and we still don’t have the right of return. I can never go back to my family’s hometown, I can never visit it.
Israel still kills innocent people every day, they still carry out atrocities in the West Bank, even outside of Gaza where there’s no Hamas. Let me ask you this hypothetical question: Would you hang a photo of the person who hurt your family, who killed your loved ones, in your own living room, knowing everything they did?**
KD: No, I wouldn’t.
IH: That’s exactly how I feel. Israel is that perpetrator for me and my family. This is an app I built, in response to the atrocities Israel has committed and continues to commit. We are never going to list Israel as a location in that dropdown. I think it’s far more important that we hold Israel accountable for all the harm it’s done over the last 70 years, and especially over the last two and a half years, than fixate on whether it’s in a dropdown menu.
KD: Taking this unapologetic, public stance like this is extremely unusual, especially for the CEO of a for-profit company. What kind of feedback do you get? What kind of messages and emails do you receive?
**IH: We get a lot of nasty messages and threats, that’s expected. But we get far more messages from users who are excited, proud, and want to be part of our vision and work. That’s what matters to us. I know people all over the world have changed their perspective over the last two years, for a lot of reasons. They see things differently now, they make different choices. They see us as an escape from Big Tech’s status quo, and they want us to grow bigger. That’s what we focus on, we rely on their trust.
Just like any other platform, users give us feedback all the time: they ask for new features, tell us what they like and what they don’t. That’s exactly what we want to hear. Overall, the feedback is far more positive than negative, it’s healthy.**
**KD: What’s your goal for UpScrolled over the next few years? If we talk again in two years, what do
