DOHA, Qatar—With TikTok now the property of an ownership group with extensive ties to the Trump administration, it should not take much for an alternative social platform to gain some quick interest. But capitalizing and building on that curiosity can be harder.
Issam Hijazi, founder and CEO of UpScrolled, brought his platform’s bid for that possible business to Web Summit Qatar. Gregg Carlstrom, The Economist’s Middle East correspondent, opened the interview by asking Hijazi, a Palestinian born in Jordan and now an Australian citizen, for his critique of the tech industry’s largest incumbents.
“They’re not really in for being ethical in general,” Hijazi said. “These companies don’t really care about the well-being of their users.”
Hijazi took particular objection to large tech companies’ having “enabled genocide on people” (which he said includes family members killed in Gaza) and staging “selective censorship.”
He didn’t cite specific examples of that censorship, but could have brought up Bisan Owda, a Gaza-based freelance journalist who has extensively covered Israel’s invasion of the territory after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel. Owda saw her TikTok account, with 1.4 million followers, banned on Thursday, then restored on Friday, with some features limited.
TikTok users in the US have also seen weirdness in general after the cutover to new ownership, such as repeated showings of the same post, which the platform blamed on power outages at data centers caused by winter storms.
UpScrolled—which lets users post text, image, and video updates and has jumped to the top 10 in Apple and Google’s app store charts—is meant to be the opposite of that, Hijazi said. “We’re giving equal opportunity for everyone to speak their mind without censoring them,” adding that UpScrolled also avoids promoting certain topics beyond offering “minor discovery features which allow you to see other content on specific topics.”
Hijazi also said he had set out to avoid over-optimizing for user engagement: “We designed UpScrolled to let people log off.”
But as pretty much every other online social site in history learns soon enough, refusing to do content moderation either ensures a toxic platform or requires management to speed-run the content moderation learning curve before users and, more importantly, advertisers flee.
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A no-censorship policy is also difficult to square with creating a site that feels welcoming to mainstream users. Hijazi set that, too, as an objective: “We want you to feel safe.”
But while he said UpScrolled would need to “stay within legal boundaries,” its own FAQ says its content moderation will include enforcing “community guidelines or broadly accepted legal and ethical standards.” The list of possible violations—“content involving illegal activity, hate speech, bullying, harassment, explicit nudity, unlicensed copyrighted material, or anything intended to cause harm”—could have come from the terms of service of most other social platforms.
UpScrolled has already had to address complaints of antisemitic or outright neo-Nazi content.
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That FAQ further explains that the company does plan to sell ads, but not any run by third-party sites or that target “personal data.”
Carlstrom asked Hijazi if these up-front pledges might make it difficult to raise money, but the founder voiced confidence. “There are a lot of ethical people around the world,” he said. “We don’t really have to rely on Zionist money, I’ll put it out there, or rely on Silicon Valley money to become big.” (Carlstrom did not ask Hijazi to expand on the phrase “Zionist money.”)
UpScrolled has yet to reach a status anybody would call “big,” but has seen its total users jump from more than one million last week to 2.5 million as of Sunday. “We’ve spent zero on branding, on marketing,” Hijazi said.
More than once, he emphasized to his interviewer that UpScrolled was seeking expert advice on how to move forward: “Even if we start with something now, it’s not going to be our blueprint forever.”
DIsclosure: Web Summit Qatar covered my airfare and lodging for my role as a panel moderator.
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Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.
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