TikTok users flock to UpScrolled in response to new U.S. owners
TikTok competitor UpScrolled has surged up Apple's App Store rankings after users began turning to the new platform en masse. According to social media sentiment, many are on the hunt for alternatives to TikTok after new U.S. owners were officially instated this week, with expected algorithm changes raising questions about what content American TikTok users will be shown.
UpScrolled unexpectedly climbed to the top 10 in Apple's U.S., UK, and Australian App Stores on Sunday, with and is now the second ranked free app in the former two — while TikTok isn't even breaking the top 25.
The app's influx of new users overwhelmed its servers over the weekend. "Crazy load on our servers. So exciting!" UpScrolled founder and CEO Issam Hijazi posted on the platform on Sunday. "Sorry about the errors and glitches, we are increasing our capacity to handle the load. We expect things to become more stable in the next 12-24 hours."
Launched in 2025 by Hijazi as an alternative to social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, UpScrolled allows users to share photos, videos, and text posts, and features a chronological feed for accounts you follow. There is also a discover feed, which UpScrolled says orders content by likes, comments, and reshares, "plus a touch of randomness to ensure every post still has a chance to be seen."
The platform has stated it is developing more feeds which may use AI to recommend content based on your past behaviour. However, UpScrolled claims that such features will be "opt-in, fair, and transparent" in how they operate.
"We exist to put fairness back at the center of social media. Every voice deserves real reach and equal treatment. No shadowbans, no hidden throttling, no pay-to-play favoritism — ever," UpScrolled's mission statement reads. "We don't push agendas — political, commercial, or otherwise. Our rules are clear and applied evenly. Our ranking is explainable, our decisions accountable, and influence comes with responsibility."
So, why are users flocking to UpScrolled?
The interest in UpScrolled notably follows TikTok's announcement last Friday that its U.S. operations have been taken over by a new, majority American-owned joint venture. TikTok's new U.S. ownership has raised fears regarding censorship on the platform, which was compounded by an outage issue that swiftly followed the change of hands.
Notably, U.S. lawmakers previously accused TikTok of pushing pro-Palestinian content to users, citing this as one of their reasons for supporting the app's ban in the country. TikTok's new owners, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, have stated they will retrain and update its recommendation algorithm, and take control of U.S. content moderation.
Some TikTok users have also expressed privacy concerns regarding relatively minor changes to TikTok's terms of service, which now state that the app may collect precise location data unless you opt out. Even so, many people moving to UpScrolled, who are posting about it online, have cited other platforms' alleged censorship of pro-Palestinian content as the reason, with some further claiming suppression of anti-ICE sentiments. TikTok itself has said it's investigating claims of the word "Epstein" disappearing in direct messages, but said it wasn't deliberately censoring the name of the convicted child sex offender.
UpScrolled founder Hijazi has expressed unequivocal support for Palestine, creating the app in late 2023 as a response to online discourse and "selective censorship" on social media platforms. Headquartered in Australia, the app was officially launched in mid-2025 and lists pro-Palestinian organisations such as Tech for Palestine and Watermelon Pictures among its partners. Hijazi himself is Palestinian-Jordanian-Australian, and has voiced concern about censorship of pro-Palestinian content by big tech companies.
"Larry Ellison, the owner of Oracle, is the biggest contributor to the Friends [of the Israeli Defence Force] charity," Hijazi said, speaking at ArabCon 2025 last September. "And that tells you something. If that person, who is friends with [Israeli prime minister] Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel in general is going to own 80 percent of TikTok moving on, and if Netanyahu himself is saying the importance of utilising TikTok and X to spread their narrative, that tells you a lot of things."
Oracle is one of TikTok's new owners in the U.S., holding a 15 percent share in the joint venture, while its executive vice president Kenneth Glueck sits on the board of directors. It is also responsible for storing and securing U.S. TikTok users' data.
As such, many TikTok users who support Palestine now consider UpScrolled to be an attractive alternative.
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The sudden surge of interest in UpScrolled is reminiscent of the X users' search for alternatives such as BlueSky after Elon Musk took control of the microblogging platform in late 2022. Thousands of users fled X in the following months, tanking the app's revenue as advertisers left as well. More recently, many TikTok users turned to Rednote, aka Xiaohongshu, when it looked as though a U.S. ban would be put in place.