⛵ Dhow Dispatch │ UpScrolled and the Fracturing of the Attention Stack

UpScrolled was founded in 2025 by Issam Hijazi, a Palestinian-Jordanian-Australian technologist who previously worked at major technology firms including IBM and Oracle before launching the platform.

Hijazi began building UpScrolled in response to what he saw as widening censorship and algorithmic bias on major social networks, especially around coverage of global events and marginalized voices. Early statements from the platform note that meaningful stories were disappearing from feeds while engagement-driven content proliferated, motivating Hijazi to create a space where “every voice has a fair chance to be seen.” Most importantly, Hijazi tragically lost over 60 family members in the Gaza Genocide, and this has energized his mission to bring free speech and transparency to the world of social media.

The website positions the app as a place free of shadowbans, hidden throttling, and pay-to-play favoritism and explicitly emphasizes algorithmic clarity and community-led visibility.

The timing of UpScrolled’s surge, coinciding with uncertainties and ownership shifts at TikTok, amplified interest in a platform that foregrounds free expression and equitable content distribution.

UpScrolled is a social platform that has gained rapid attention amid renewed scrutiny of large platform ownership and governance. Its core appeal is straightforward. It emphasizes chronological feeds, reduced reliance on opaque algorithmic ranking, and clearer content rules compared to incumbents whose moderation systems have grown increasingly complex.

Users can post text, photos, and short videos while interacting with a mix of chronological and popular feeds designed to reduce the influence of hidden recommendation systems.

The platform positions itself as an alternative rather than a replacement. UpScrolled also surged in the App Store, reaching the #1 most downloaded free app as of today.

As faith in our governing institutions erode, the nature of the TikTok deal has put off many users both domestically and globally. Fears of suppression were confirmed this week.

Furthermore, for years, users have complained about being shadowbanned and censored on other social media platforms, including Facebook/Instagram.

For Muslim creators, journalists, and founders, these dynamics are not theoretical.

Content removals without explanation, reduced reach without notification, and inconsistent enforcement have been recurring experiences across platforms. Appeals processes are often slow or opaque, and policy language leaves wide discretion in how rules are applied.

Over time, this produces a predictable response. People self-censor, avoid certain topics, or fragment their presence across platforms to reduce dependence on any single channel.

UpScrolled’s appeal to many in our community stems from this history. It offers a sense of legibility in an environment where visibility has often felt conditional.

The focus on platform power is part of a larger story about consolidation. Media companies, cloud providers, and data infrastructure are folding into the same few hands. Products may look different on the surface, but they rely on the same systems underneath; our community is in trouble if we don’t build responses to these power moves.

This represents a major shift in Muslim consumers (and arguably amongst American consumers). We couldn’t have imagined a migration of users from an established platform to a new platform on the basis of data security and censorship fears.

The Ellison moment made that visible, not because of one choice or deal, but because it exposed how vulnerable we are on the platforms we use on a daily basis.

UpScrolled benefits from clarity, simplicity, and a moment of user skepticism toward incumbents. Those are meaningful advantages early on.

At the same time, the challenges ahead are real. Monetization pressures, moderation at scale, and governance under growth have reshaped every social platform before it. The platform encountered some noticeable technical hiccups in response to the surge in downloads, but these were fixed relatively quickly (credits to Issam and his team, who haven’t slept in days).

The big question here is whether UpScrolled can continue this exponential growth; we believe that they can if they continue to iterate and improve the user experience. The core product (a social media platform that is not in cahoots with powers-that-be) is solid, but there is room for improvement in the UI and in the functionality of the app.

That being said, after watching Issam and his team respond to the technical difficulties resulting from the surge in downloads, the Dhow team is confident UpScrolled can carry this momentum in the mid-term.

This story suggests that attention is becoming more mobile, not less. Users are increasingly willing to move when trust breaks rather than waiting for platforms to correct course.

It also reinforces that distribution is infrastructure. Control over visibility, moderation, and monetization shapes who gets heard and who gets ignored, regardless of intent.

Communities that recognize this early will invest differently in how they communicate, where they build audiences, and which platforms they rely on.

UpScrolled is resistance. We the people no longer assume platforms are neutral, stable, or aligned with our interests by default.

Ownership, infrastructure, and incentives shape outcomes long before policies are enforced. Communities that have experienced filtering and suppression understand this intuitively because they’ve lived it.

At Dhow, we pay attention to these systems for the same reason we study capital structures. Power compounds toward structure, not rhetoric. Understanding where leverage lives is the first step to building something durable.

If this helped clarify why ventures like UpScrolled matter, share it with a friend or two. Download the app, and support Issam and his team.


At Dhow, we back builders who go where the map runs out. UpScrolled is built on a simple belief: people will trade comfort for clarity. Features like chronological feeds, transparent governance, and a public promise not to shadowban aren’t selling points, they’re corrections. They answer a landscape where power keeps drifting away from users and toward the back end of the system. The real test will come with scale. If UpScrolled can hold its principles under pressure, it might not just attract early adopters; it could prove that trust can still be built on open ground. Join the movement, share this with a friend (or two).

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