One week into the job, and TikTok’s new American owners have a hot new competitor on their hands.
Driving the news: Australian social media platform UpScrolled catapulted to No. 1 in the U.S. App Store rankings this week following the sale of TikTok’s U.S. businesses to a group of mostly American investors.
UpScrolled — which looks like an Instagram-Twitter hybrid — pitches itself as an apolitical platform free of censorship, pay-to-play algorithms, and shadowbanning.
The company was founded by Palestinian-Australian Issam Hijazi. In a LinkedIn post, UpScrolled highlighted a pro-Palestinian influencer who was repeatedly banned on Instagram, saying that type of “suppression” was the reason Hijazi built the platform.
Why it matters: UpScrolled has capitalized on recent allegations that TikTok’s new U.S. owners — particularly Oracle, which is led by an ally of Donald Trump — are censoring content for political reasons, including videos of ICE, content that is critical of Trump, and even the word “Epstein”.
California Governor Gavin Newsom said this week that he’s launching an investigation into the censorship allegations, though TikTok has insisted that alleged instances of censorship are actually bugs caused by a data centre outage.
Yes, but: UpScrolled claims to be a politically neutral platform, but it certainly has activist roots and appears to have already made politically charged design decisions.
For example, some users have reported that the platform doesn’t let users set their location to Israel, instead referring to it as the “Occupied Territories of Palestine.”
Our take: UpScrolled may or may not stick around, but its sudden surge in popularity shows that there is a real appetite for a version of social media that isn’t driven entirely by algorithms. In the meantime, some healthy skepticism about claims of political neutrality is probably warranted. Remember, it wasn’t too long ago that Twitter was rebranded to X under a very similar free speech ethos.