January 22nd was the deadline for the official takeover of TikTok in the US, following a deal reached with ByteDance, the
parent company, and American companies, including data giants Oracle, to save the platform from being banned in the US. This
takeover comes as criticism of censorship and Algorithmic distrust increased. This coincided with TikTok experiencing technical
issue which they attributed to data centre outages that they were experiencing. For the last 2yrs The big social media
platforms, including X, Facebook, and TikTok, have faced backlash after being accused of censoringcontent critical of how
Israel was executing its war in Gaza that has led to a huge humanitarian crisis.
In response, Up scrolled a barely known social media app, surged in popularity with the app taking the #2 spot on Apple store
free downloads. This came as a surprise to Issam Hijazi, the Palestinian Australian technologist who founded the platform last
year as an alternative to other Tech giants, who he accused of not being impartial and promoting biased political agendas.
Hijazi took to X to express his gratitude to all the love his platform was getting from thousands of new users. “Well, this is new
…you showed up so fast our servers tapped out, “Frustrating? Yes. Emotionally, also yes. We’re a tiny team building what big
tech Companies stopped being.”
I recently created an account on Upscrolled. From my limited interactions with the platform, I will concede that the algorithm is
very organic and pure. It remains to be seen whether that will continue to stick when the platform expands
