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📂 **Category**: Business,Politics,The Big Interview
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If you don’t You’ve heard of UpScrolled before, a brief primer: It’s a social media platform that’s not much different from Instagram or TikTok, for example. You can share photos or short videos, follow accounts, comment on posts, and gather your own followers. Nothing earth-shattering, right?
But UpScrolled’s founder, Issam Hegazy, disagrees. In fact, his startup differs from most big tech platforms in several notable ways: UpScrolled offers an old-fashioned chronological feed, rather than an algorithm-dictated feed that ostensibly delivers content you’ll stick with; The platform also promises not to share user data with marketing companies or other commercial organizations. Hijazi, who is of Palestinian descent, founded UpScrolled in response to widespread user allegations that some social media companies were censoring or blocking their posts — especially pro-Palestinian content. The platform explicitly pledges to “never” secretly suppress content, provided it does not violate the UpScrolled Community Guidelines.
Aside from departing from many of the norms of big tech companies, Hegazy’s position is rare among Silicon Valley types for being both unique and overtly ideological. (In our conversation, Hegazy told me that he had “personally” ensured that UpScrolled users couldn’t choose Israel as a location when using the platform.) But the approach resonated: When we first met in February, just eight months after Hegazy launched UpScrolled, the platform had quickly amassed 2.5 million users following panic over TikTok’s deal with President Trump to form a US-based version of the company controlled by US investors. Hegazy was, at the time, UpScrolled’s only employee.
Today, with UpScrolled reaching over 5 million users, Hegazy has been quick to expand 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 claims it isn’t doing enough to stamp out anti-Semitic and extremist content. During a wide-ranging conversation last week, I asked Hegazy about these claims, and how UpScrolled has managed to catch up with its rapid growth.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Katie Drummond: Hi Essam, welcome to The Big Interview.
Issam Hegazy: Hi Katie. Thanks for having me.
I’m so glad you’re here. I want to start with your background. It’s a great one. I have previously worked at large technology companies. I worked at IBM; You work at Oracle. Tell us about your history with technology and how it has shaped your views on the technology industry and social media more specifically.
I have been working in technology for 17 and a half years. Before that, I started programming when I was 12 years old. So I was pretty much involved in IT and technology from a very early stage. Now, over my career, as I mentioned, I’ve worked with companies like Oracle, IBM, Hitachi, and then small startups.
As a young professional, this is a dream job. This is something every child wants to be. Big companies have great technologies and there are a lot of opportunities to learn, but when you understand and learn about the mechanics of these companies, you start to wonder: Is this the right place to be? This is the feeling I’ve started to feel in the past three years, and it’s what made me shift my focus to wanting to start something new.
These companies have been complicit in the bad things happening around the world. Things like the Gaza genocide, for example, by providing technology, infrastructure, knowledge, etc. to countries like Israel. And allow them to do the monitoring. Personally, I felt complicit in working with them, and I wanted out.
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