{"id":379428,"date":"2026-04-07T11:18:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-07T11:18:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/379428\/"},"modified":"2026-04-07T11:18:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T11:18:08","slug":"he-started-a-social-network-alone-then-5-million-people-signed-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/379428\/","title":{"rendered":"He Started a Social Network Alone. Then 5 Million People Signed Up"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you haven\u2019t heard of UpScrolled before, a brief primer: It\u2019s a social media platform not too different from, say, Instagram<\/a> or TikTok<\/a>. You can share photos or short videos, follow accounts, comment on posts, and amass a following of your own. Nothing too earth-shattering, right?<\/p>\n

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\u2019ll 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\u2014particularly pro-Palestinian content. The platform explicitly vows \u201cnever\u201d to covertly suppress content, provided it doesn\u2019t violate UpScrolled\u2019s community guidelines.<\/p>\n

Aside from breaking with plenty of Big Tech norms, Hijazi\u2019s stance is rare among Silicon Valley types for being uniquely, overtly ideological. (In our conversation, Hijazi told me that he \u201cpersonally\u201d ensured UpScrolled users couldn\u2019t 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\u2019s deal with President Trump to form a US-based version of the company controlled by American investors. Hijazi was, at that time, UpScrolled\u2019s only employee.<\/p>\n

Today, as UpScrolled counts more than 5 million users, Hijazi has rushed to scale his team to meet the platform\u2019s growing needs\u2014particularly around content moderation. Recently, his company has found itself in the crosshairs of organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, which alleges it doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n

KATIE DRUMMOND: Hi, Issam, welcome to The Big Interview.<\/p>\n

ISSAM HIJAZI: Hi, Katie. Thank you for having me.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m very happy you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you haven\u2019t heard of UpScrolled before, a brief primer: It\u2019s a social media platform not too different…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":379429,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[18909,146,85,46,47,965,3929,2460,18910],"class_list":{"0":"post-379428","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-big-interview","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-israel","12":"tag-middle-east","13":"tag-podcasts","14":"tag-qa","15":"tag-social-media","16":"tag-uncanny-valley-podcast"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379428\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/379429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}