If you haven’t heard of UpScrolled before, a brief primer: It’s a social media platform not too different from, say, Instagram or TikTok. You can share photos or short videos, follow accounts, comment on posts, and amass a following of your own. Nothing too earth-shattering, right?

UpScrolled founder Issam Hijazi would beg to differ. Indeed, his nascent company diverges from most Big Tech platforms in a few notable ways: UpScrolled offers an old-fashioned chronological feed, rather than one dictated by an algorithm ostensibly serving up content you’ll latch onto; the platform also promises not to share user data with marketing firms or other commercial enterprises. And Hijazi, who is of Palestinian descent, founded UpScrolled in response to widespread user allegations that some social media companies were censoring or shadow-banning their posts—particularly pro-Palestinian content. The platform explicitly vows “never” to covertly suppress content, provided it doesn’t violate UpScrolled’s community guidelines.

Aside from breaking with plenty of Big Tech norms, Hijazi’s stance is rare among Silicon Valley types for being uniquely, overtly ideological. (In our conversation, Hijazi told me that he “personally” ensured UpScrolled users couldn’t select Israel as a location when using the platform.) But the approach has resonated: When we first met in February, a mere eight months after Hijazi launched UpScrolled, the platform had rapidly amassed 2.5 million users following freakouts over TikTok’s deal with President Trump to form a US-based version of the company controlled by American investors. Hijazi was, at that time, UpScrolled’s only employee.

Today, as UpScrolled counts more than 5 million users, Hijazi has rushed to scale 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 alleges it doesn’t do nearly enough to stomp out antisemitic and extremist content. During a wide-ranging conversation last week I asked Hijazi about those claims, and how UpScrolled is catching up with its ...