Can UpScrolled Keep Up With a Surge in Users?

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2:07From Wired, this is The Big Interview, where we get to know the people behind the headlines in conversations that explore the intersection of technology, power, and culture. I'm Katie Drummond, Wired's Global Editorial Director, and today we're talking about Upscrolls, a relatively new social media app that lets you post text, photos, and videos, and says it prioritizes content over algorithms. The app started off the year with a bang. It became the number one downloaded app on U.S. app stores in late January, and Upscrolls says it has now surpassed 5.5 million users. The app was created by Issam Hijazi, a Palestinian-Jordanian-Australian with a background in tech, who looked at the options out there and said, actually, I want to make something new.

2:52He joins me now from Amsterdam. Lucky Issam. Hi, welcome to The Big Interview. Hi, Katie. Thanks for having me. Very happy that you're here. Now, I want to actually start by just talking about your background. It's a fascinating one. You've worked for big tech companies before. You worked at IBM. You worked at Oracle. Tell us a little bit about that, about your history with tech and how it shaped your views on the tech industry and on social media more specifically. Absolutely. Great question. So I've been working in the tech industry for the past 17 years and a half. And even prior to that, I started coding actually when I was 12 years old.

3:27So I'm pretty much involved in IT and technology since 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. It's great companies, they 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 if this is the right place to be at. And this is something I've been starting to have in the past three years, and that made me shift my focus on wanting to start something new.

4:05These companies have been complicit in bad things that's happening around the world. Things like genocide in Gaza, for instance, by supplying technology, infrastructure, knowledge, etc. to countries like Israel and allowing them to do surveillance. And personally, I felt complicit just working for them and I wanted out. And talk to me then about that moment where you threw up your hands and you said, that's it. I'm starting something new. I'm starting upscroll. Talk to me about the origins of the company that you're leading now. Yeah, so this happened precisely in October 2023, when I started to see the genocide unfolding on our screens in real time.

4:52Personally, I've changed. I started to see things differently. I was affected deeply, not only because I'm a Palestinian, Katie, because I'm a human being after all. So in addition to that, I've got family members in Gaza, from cousins to extended family members who got killed during the past two years and a half. So it affected me deeply. It changed my perspective into 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.

5:32And I've looked around and I've noticed a lot of people been trying to post and talk about what's happening on social media platforms, but they were shadow banned. They were selectively censored. Whenever they post something, it was taken down or that content was not reaching the people that follow them. And that was happening across multiple social media platforms. And in some instances, some of those users were completely removed or deactivated from these platforms without giving those users the reason for the removal itself. At that moment, I felt that it was a time to give people back control into how they want to express themselves.

6:10And I looked around and I've seen, I've done research, I've noticed people are looking for alternatives, but there was a lack of ethical or reliable alternative. So at that point, I decided to put every waking hour of my days, all the efforts that I have, all my resources, including financially, do a lot of compromises, including for my family, to build that platform. And that sounded crazy back then and still sounds crazy today, if you ask me, especially that I was against and still against those big tech platforms who have billions and billions of users and have billions and billions in funding, resources, and influence from different people and organizations.

6:52But I was still determined to try this out and give it a shot. Back in 2025, in July, we launched Upscroll, and we started to see people coming into the platform and willingness from users to switch or completely stop using other platforms such as Instagram or X or TikTok and start using an ethical platform. Talk to me about actually designing upscrolls and sort of how you thought about the user experience. People can post text, they can post photos, they can post videos, they can like, comment, and repost content. When you were designing it, what were you most focused on? What kind of user experience do you want people to have when they download the app and they start using it?

7:36I wanted to create an experience that feels familiar to them. I didn't want to create something unique or have an interface that's different. I wanted something that would instantly feel familiar to them. 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. And that's intentional. I did not want to create something new that needed a certain learning curve or confusing them. I just wanted it to be as easy as possible for them. And that had been perceived pretty well by those users.

8:09It's crazy to think of trying to create a new social media just for the sake of it. So that was intentional. And I knew the users that would join Upscroll, they want to join it because of a reason. And that reason is because they have been suppressed, they have been oppressed, or they went out from the existing, you know, backtech that they've been using for the past two decades, really. So yeah, as you mentioned, we do have all kinds of functionalities that allows them to engage with one another, follow. So it's pretty much familiar. It's pretty much standard. Nothing really new from a functionality perspective.

8:41But behind the scenes, there's a lot of differences. And I'm curious about that because I think you've said that upscroll doesn't use AI or algorithms to determine what content people see, if I'm correct there. What informs the content that I would see when I open upscroll and I start looking through my feed? What's behind that? What is happening behind the scenes? What's happening behind the scene is very chronological feed. I love chronology. Thank you for sticking with chronology. I think too many social media apps have lost the plot when it comes to the chronological feed. Yeah, yeah. And the fact is, 20 years ago, these things existed and we loved them.

9:22But then they started to introduce algorithms, thinking that it will 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, organization, and staying 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 about things. And these other platforms systematically have been designing and continue to design their algorithm to keep you hooked and try to push content that may not be really relevant to you.

10:02And that sometimes have been associated with pushing propagandas or pushing, you know, political views. And as you can see with certain specific social media organizations that's out there, people just need simplicity. They just want to connect with our people who have a simple social experience, just like it was 20 years ago, as simple as that. Yes, I want to see the newest thing. And then as I scroll, I want to get to the older things. I really appreciate that. Now, I met you very, very briefly. you might not remember this because you were crazed at Web Summit in Doha. I think this was in early February.

10:40And I think that you were right in the midst of this massive surge in your user base. I think you said you had something like 2 million users, but that was up from like 150 ,000 in a month. I am fascinated by what your life has been like for the last three months. How small was the company when you started to experience that surge? And how have you handled the kind of exponential growth that you've experienced? What's the good? What's the bad? What's been like the hardest thing you've had to deal with? Let's go back about nine months ago when we launched in July. I haven't slept properly since then.

11:23Oh, no. It was pretty much, it was a one-man show and that's me and everyone. It was just you. It was just me. Wow. And Katie, when you run a social media platform, there's a lot of things that you need to manage. Infrastructure. You need to manage users' expectations. You need to manage support. You need to manage content moderation. You need to make sure the app actually works on Chinese devices, Japanese devices, American devices. And then you've got the need to do some sort of marketing in a way. And you need to do fundraising. ask money to put money in the new company so you can raise capital and hire people.

11:59So I was doing that for the past, before the surge, for the past six months before the surge. And I even had to get my wife and my new baby girl. She's now 21 months. And I told them, we were in Sydney, and I told them, hey, I'm going to be very busy for the next few months. How about you go spend the summer vacation in Jordan with the family? and yeah, you come back in September. Hopefully things will be better by then. That never happened. I kept pushing and saying, hey, stay in Jordan a little bit further. I needed to travel to the US, other countries to present up school to different people and organization conferences and things like that.

12:40Up until the point I told her, hey, how about you stay in Jordan? I'll come to Jordan and see you both. And that was over about six months. So there was a personal sacrifice of me not being with my family, especially with my daughter. for, you know, the best six months of her life. Let's put it that way. Oh, yeah. But I know I was on a mission and I wanted to make this successful. Now, moving into January, things did not really get any easier. I knew about the TikTok deal that's going to be officially signed by Larry Ellison and be owned by an American investors, et cetera. But I did not really anticipate what was about to happen.

13:16I thought that, yeah, we'll get, you know, some new additional thousands of users. And up until the 20th of January, we had approximately 150 ,000 users. And up until then, it was still me running everything. And I felt like a small community. I knew almost everyone on the platform. I was chatting with them, asking what's working, what's not, trying to improve. I'm still trying to raise funding to build the team and the company and so on. During that time, during the official signing of the TikTok deal, I was in the US and I I was at some event in the Bay Area. And before going to the stage, I was looking at the dashboards for the platform.

13:56And I started to see something strange happening. And then I started to check other resources like the stats on the app stores. And I started to see upscroll jumping, you know, from, I don't know, 150 to 80, 60, and crawling its way to the top. I was like, okay, something is happening. It wasn't too scary. we had like tens of thousands of new users. I was excited. I was going to announce this on the stage when I speak on that specific conference in the Bay Area. But then after that specific event, things got more crazy. I started to see hundreds of thousands of people signing up to the platform.

14:35I started to get phone calls, emails from people telling me, hey, your app is number 10 in Australia. Your app number 10 in Dayuki. And I was checking. I was, this is unbelievable. This is surreal. I did not really anticipate that. And it got all the way to number one by the end of January. And I think by the end of January, we had about 2.5 million users. And it was still me running the show. I was getting invited by different news outlets to talk about this, what was happening. People I've never met in my life talking to me, sending me messages. and Wip Summit people invited me to Qatar to, you know, open, to have one of the keynotes opening on the first day.

15:20So they flew me in. I went to Qatar and that's probably how you saw me there. Yep. And then we had the announcement of the 2.5 million users. And it's been growing since then. But as you can imagine, with that kind of growth comes a lot of challenges and I needed to do a lot of firefighting during that period. So yeah, I haven't slept a lot. I can't even imagine that you have slept at all. The fact that you have slept at all sounds like a miracle. I mean, how many people have you hired now? It's you and how many others? Now we are a much better place. We have about 25 people working at Upscroll.

16:00And that's between engineering, between brand comms and strategy, as well as content moderators, obviously. HR function, and people helping with the management of the projects that we have internally. I had to spin off that team really quickly, so I relied on my connections, referrals. I was extremely lucky in finding many people who love the mission of Upscroll, and they came from very interesting places with amazing experiences, and they just want to have all that experience that they had into Upscroll. So I would say I'm pretty lucky from that regards to be surrounded by the music team now.

16:40What's been the most brutal learning experience from all of this? What's been the hardest thing, the moment of failure? Has there been something that stands out of just like the nightmare day, the nightmare hour? Look, I think what we had is a problem, you can say, but it's one of those good problems to have. It's one of those problems that you wouldn't anticipate, the growth itself. It's great because it's growth, but with growth, of course, comes all set of challenges. You need to manage suddenly millions and millions of users. You need to suddenly manage bad actors who want intentionally to bring the system down by attacking it.

17:23And from technical perspective, by also posting all kinds of nasty content intentionally, and then taking screenshots and then sending that to reporters and saying this and that about the platform mission and what we're trying to build here. So I guess that was the biggest problem or challenge that we had within Upscroll when it comes to managing all these users as well as the content. Now you wouldn't face these kind of issues with different businesses, but when you're dealing with user-generated content, that is going to be something to expect. So if I would go back in time, I would probably spend more time on things that would help me if such sudden things happen from automation, from things that catch certain failures, for example, in the system and scale accordingly.

18:11But like I mentioned, Katie, it's a good problem to have. We managed to get out of it successfully. We're in a much better place now and we'll continue to improve as we move forward. We have to take a quick break, then we'll be back with more.

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20:25How do you imagine Upscrolls making money? I mean, are you making money right now as a company? How do you eventually plan to monetize what you're doing? Great question. Currently, we're not making any money. We're backed by certain angel investors who are aligned with our values, as well as VCs who are aligned with our values. and I'm personally extremely picky when it comes to who wants to put money in upscrolled and that's for the obvious reason. I want to continue to have this platform being an ethical platform, always standing on our values moving forward. But yeah, when it comes to monetization, there's a lot of way to monetize.

21:04Existing platforms, social media platforms, they have done many of those things that we will maybe do some of them. Example, verified users, verify the organization you get the blue check mark after you verify your identity you pay subscription fee for example and that's one way to generate money we will open it up as well market place kind of feature so if you're small business you want to sell items you can do that we take commission if you're a producer content creator and people aren't interested in your content they can subscribe to your content specifically they pay you you set the price We take small commission out of that.

21:43And the last thing will be something related to ads that we can run on the platform. But even with ads, we're going to be selective in who would be able to advertise on the platform itself. We will ensure that ethical businesses will be giving that opportunity. But businesses that we believe that have been complicit in bad things around the world don't get that opportunity. And I think that's a great place for small, medium-sized businesses to find the right audience. We already have them. They can find users who are ready to switch to other services. So that can be like the great place to pitch what they offer and have those users switching to their services.

22:23Now, you've mentioned this a little bit and alluded to it a little bit too, around the issue of content moderation, you know, upscrolled as this surge and this sort of incredible growth happened has also been criticized. And I want to make sure I give you a chance to respond to that and that we can sort of get into it. You know, critics earlier this year flagged extremist content, anti-Semitic content on the platform. The ADL Anti-Defamation League put out a very heated statement alleging that Upscroll lacks enforcement protections. Can you respond to that? I mean, how did you sort of see that unfold from where you sit?

22:59Yeah, excellent question. We're a new social media platform. And if you look at the existing landscape, Keri, you'll notice that existing social media platforms that have been there for the past 20 years or so, still have problem when it comes to content moderation. You'll find a lot of hate speech, which I would love to believe that these platforms don't allow, but you still find it if you open these apps today. So it's a problem that all social media platforms have, and we're no different. User-generated content can have that risk and it needs to be addressed. Now, regarding all these articles or organization that you've mentioned, all these content that have been reported on these articles have been removed from the platform even before the article was published.

23:40Probably they took some screenshots and made it to the article. We do not allow hate speech on the platform. We do not allow Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, or any kind of hate really on the platform. We want to build a platform that is safe for everyone to exist, to speak freely, but within legal boundaries, within respect that people can respect one another and people doesn't have fear to speak about what matters to them. We are continuing to strengthen the mechanisms in how we detect certain bad content internally. We have definitely had a bigger moderation team over the past couple of months.

24:15And currently we're sitting at zero backlog in terms of bad content or nasty content on the platform. They will still continue to try to post this, post this kind of nasty content on the platform, and we will continue to fight it and remove it on the platform. We're very strict when it comes to this thing. And we have community guidelines, which is publicly available that states where we stand and what is allowed and what's not really allowed. Got it. And in terms of sort of how this works in the background, are you primarily at this point pursuing a human-led moderation approach? I mean, is it sort of people who are handling this day-to-day as opposed to, you know, AI, for example, that would potentially be able to automate some of that function?

24:57I mean, how are you thinking about content moderation, maybe compared to some of these larger social media platforms that have automated a lot of that? Yeah, yeah, good question. So currently it's a manual process. So we have content moderators. They receive reports, they look into them, and according to the policies, they take action. Users are able to report any content that they see, and they tend to do that quite fast, so we're able to catch any bad content on the platform quite quickly. Now, to scale, we are doing some internal R &D and integration with AI models that are able to detect but not make decisions.