The TikTok Exodus: Why Everyone is Moving to UpScrolled
Toggle Dark Mode
We recently reported on the culmination of a years long TikTok saga that ramped up in 2024 when President Joe Biden signed the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA).
America was ready to ban TikTok. This eventually forced TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to spin off its US operations after President Trump and the Justice Department bought TikTok some additional time by helping ByteDance avoid a ban. Last Thursday, ByteDance finalized the transfer of 80.1% of its US business unit to TikTok USDS Joint Venture, LLC, a conglomerate of companies, investment firms, and individuals.
Despite ByteDance divesting control of TikTok in the US, the drama has continued. The transition is off to a rocky start. TikTok users began reporting problems uploading videos related to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the recent ICE shootings in Minneapolis. Others claimed their posts related to the shootings were flagged as “Ineligible for Recommendation” or “temporarily suspended.” TikTok was quick to dismiss censorship claims, blaming the issues on a data center outage that disturbed infrastructure.
For many users, the timing was too “coincidental” to ignore, while others seemingly voted with their digital feet and chose to leave the service as soon as the US deal was announced. In either case, it seems many of the folks who are abandoning TikTok are joining an alternative social media platform that few had heard much about before now: UpScrolled.
The relatively unknown social media service has seen unprecedented growth over the past week — to the point where its servers have had a hard time keeping up. Between Thursday, January 23 — the day the TikTok USDS deal was announced — and Saturday January 25, UpScrolled averaged 14,000 downloads per day — a huge jump from the modest 460 average daily downloads prior to the TikTok transition. As of today, it’s now in fourth place on Apple’s most popular free apps list.
What is UpScrolled?
Launching in June of 2025, UpScrolled is relatively new to the social media scene. It offers a look and feel similar to more mainstream platforms like Instagram and TikTok, and is designed for sharing text, photos, and short videos. It operates out of Australia with its core infrastructure hosted in Dublin, Ireland.
UpScrolled’s founding philosophy is what seemingly separates it from the pack and has helped it to attract new users. Founder Issam Hijazi was inspired to build UpScrolled out of frustration with what he viewed as biased algorithms and the suppression of content elsewhere. Those are the same ideals that ostensibly motivated Elon Musk to buy Twitter. According to UpScrolled’s About page:
Too often, users are left uncertain about whether their voices will be heard or quietly suppressed. UpScrolled changes that by ensuring every post has a fair chance to be seen, creating an environment that is authentic, unfiltered, and equitable for all.
UpScrolled uses a simple algorithm that maintains user-driven and 100% chronological feeds, ensuring users are seeing content as it’s posted. It also connects to other social platforms, allowing users to share and schedule the sharing of content from various online communities.
The service claims it does not and never will engage in “shadowbanning” or “stealth banning”— the practice of discreetly restricting a social media user’s content without notification to make their posts essentially invisible to anyone else.
This doesn’t mean UpScrolled is a free-for-all. It still maintains and enforces community guidelines — and promises to do so in an up-front and transparent way — but according to UpScrolled, there’s no censorship of opinions. Better yet, UpScrolled does not share data with third parties for marketing purposes, a refreshing change in the current social media landscape.
UpScrolled says it exists because “…we were tired of waiting for Big Tech to do the right thing. We needed a place where people could speak freely without playing algorithm games or being punished for telling the truth.” If you feel the same way, give it a shot. We’ll see if its newfound popularity continues.
