He Started a Social Network Alone. Then 5 Million People Signed Up

If you haven’t heard of UpScrolled before, a brief primer: It’s a social media platform not too different from, say, Instagram or TikTok. You can share photos or short videos, follow accounts, comment on posts, and amass a following of your own. Nothing too earth-shattering, right?

UpScrolled founder Issam Hijazi would beg to differ. Indeed, his nascent company diverges from most Big Tech platforms in a few notable ways: UpScrolled offers an old-fashioned chronological feed, rather than one dictated by an algorithm ostensibly serving up content you’ll latch onto; the platform also promises not to share user data with marketing firms or other commercial enterprises. And Hijazi, who is of Palestinian descent, founded UpScrolled in response to widespread user allegations that some social media companies were censoring or shadow-banning their posts—particularly pro-Palestinian content. The platform explicitly vows “never” to covertly suppress content, provided it doesn’t violate UpScrolled’s community guidelines.

Aside from breaking with plenty of Big Tech norms, Hijazi’s stance is rare among Silicon Valley types for being uniquely, overtly ideological. (In our conversation, Hijazi told me that he “personally” ensured UpScrolled users couldn’t select Israel as a location when using the platform.) But the approach has resonated: When we first met in February, a mere eight months after Hijazi launched UpScrolled, the platform had rapidly amassed 2.5 million users following freakouts over TikTok’s deal with President Trump to form a US-based version of the company controlled by American investors. Hijazi was, at that time, UpScrolled’s only employee.

Today, as UpScrolled counts more than 5 million users, Hijazi has rushed to scale his team to meet the platform’s growing needs—particularly around content moderation. Recently, his company has found itself in the crosshairs of organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, which alleges it doesn’t do nearly enough to stomp out antisemitic and extremist content. During a wide-ranging conversation last week I asked Hijazi about those claims, and how UpScrolled is catching up with its own rapid 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.

I’m very happy you’re here. I want to start with your background. It's a fascinating one. Previously, you've worked for big tech companies. You worked at IBM; you worked at Oracle. Tell us about your history with tech and how it shaped your views on the tech industry and on social media more specifically.

I've been working in the tech industry for the past 17 and a half years. Prior to that, I started coding when I was 12 years old. So I was pretty involved in IT and technology from a very early stage. Now, within my career, as you mentioned, I did work with the likes of Oracle, IBM, Hitachi, and then small startups.

As a young professional, that is a dream job. That is something that every kid wants to be in. Great companies that have great technologies and there's a lot of opportunity to learn, but as you get to understand and learn about the mechanics of these companies, you start to wonder: Is this the right place to be at? This is a feeling I started to have in the past three years, and that made me shift my focus on wanting to start something new.

These companies have been complicit in bad things that are happening around the world. Things like genocide in Gaza, for instance, by supplying technology, infrastructure, knowledge, et cetera, to countries like Israel. And allowing them to do surveillance. Personally, I felt complicit just working for them, and I wanted out.

Talk to me then about that moment you threw up your hands and said, “That's it. I'm starting something new. I'm starting UpScrolled.”

This happened when I started to see this genocide unfolding on our screens in real time. I started to see things differently.

I was affected deeply, not only because I'm a Palestinian, Katie, because I'm a human being. In addition to that, I've got family members in Gaza, from cousins to extended family members, who got killed. So it affected me deeply. It changed my perspective on how I see life, how I see career, how I see people, and it dropped a lot of the masks around me.

At that moment I felt I needed to do something, because I was fortunate enough not to be in Gaza, not to be in Palestine, and just to give something back to those people in general. I looked around and noticed a lot of people trying to post and talk about what's happening on social media platforms, but they were shadow-banned. They were selectively censored. That was happening across multiple social media platforms.

At that moment, I felt it was time to give people back control into how they want to express themselves. I did research and I noticed people were looking for alternatives, but there was a lack of ethical or reliable alternatives. So at that point, I decided to put in every waking hour of my days, all my resources, including financially, to build that platform.

That sounded crazy back then. It still sounds crazy today if you ask me. But I was still determined to try this out and give it a shot. Back in 2025 in July, we launched UpScrolled and we started to see people coming onto the platform and willingness from users to switch or completely stop using other platforms such as Instagram or X or TikTok.

Talk to me about designing UpScrolled and how you thought about the user experience. People can post text, they can post photos, they can post videos, they can comment and repost content. When you were designing it, what were you most focused on?

I wanted to create an experience that feels familiar. I didn't want to create something unique or have an interface that's different. So when they switch from Instagram or they switch from X, for example, they will feel that the app is pretty much the same in terms of functionality or the things that they do. That's intentional.

It's crazy to think of trying to create a new social media just for the sake of it. I knew the users that would join UpScrolled would want to join it for a reason. That reason is that they have been suppressed, they have been oppressed, or they want out from the existing tech that they've been using for the past two decades, really.

We do have all kinds of functionalities that allow them to engage with one another. Nothing really new from a functionality perspective, but behind the scenes there are a lot of differences.

I'm curious about that, because I think you've said that UpScrolled doesn't use AI or algorithms to determine what content people see. What informs the content that I would see when I open UpScrolled and start looking through my feed? What's behind that?

What's happening behind the scenes is a very chronological feed.

I love chronology. I think too many social media apps have lost the plot when it comes to the chronological feed.

The fact is, 20 years ago these things existed and we loved them. But then they started to introduce algorithmic feeds, thinking that would give us a better experience, but in reality it just made us addicted to something that has no value.

All you need is to follow the people that you like, people that you're interested in, news agencies, organizations, and stay up-to-date with them. You don't want an algorithm to decide what you want or what you like, or influence you or change the way you think.

How have you handled the kind of exponential growth you've experienced? What's the good, what's the bad? What's been the hardest thing you've had to deal with?

Let's go back to about nine months ago, when we launched in July. I haven’t slept properly since then.

Oh no.

It was a one-man show, and that's me. And Katie, when you run a social media platform, there's a lot of things that you need to manage: