UpScrolled is a social media haven for unspeakable antisemitism. How does that help Palestinians?

UpScrolled is supposed to support Palestinian freedom — and its rife with antisemitism. Image by Forward Collage/Canva

Senior Columnist Rob Eshman February 14, 2026

When Issam Hijazi launched the social media app UpScrolled last June, he positioned it as the antidote to Big Tech censorship — a haven where pro-Palestinian voices could finally speak freely. The platform really took off in January, expanding to some 2.5 million users. It looked like the Promised Land for internet denizens concerned that TikTok, Facebook and X suppressed speech or monitored users.

So, a few days ago, I created an UpScrolled account and listed my interests as “Politics.” Then the platform delivered exactly what its algorithm thought I wanted, based on that limited information: accusations that Israel runs a bioweapons lab out of a Las Vegas AirBnB; endless conspiratorial exposes about supposed connections between Jeffrey Epstein and the Mossad; Holocaust denial posts hashtagged #holohoax; and a Der Stürmer-worthy caricature of a hook-nosed Jew hunched over gold coins.

In other words: The app showcases the bankruptcy of the part of the American pro-Palestinian advocacy movement that can only imagine liberation through Jewish annihilation.

The freedom to glorify murder

Existing social media platforms have their share of antisemitism, misinformation and hate. But what stood out about UpScrolled was the absolute imbalance. There’s widespread glorification of Hamas, and a total lack of any thoughtful content about Jews and Israel.

No substantive critiques of settlement expansion. No debate about two-state versus binational solutions. No Israeli or Palestinian voices for coexistence. Just lots of posts celebrating Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader whose “strategy” built to the Oct. 7, 2023 attack, resulting in the destruction of Palestinian society in Gaza.

How is lionizing the architects of Palestinian suffering — a goal that Hamas transparently sees as serving its interest — remotely “pro-Palestinian”?

“We support initiatives that can make an impact in some way in the liberation of Palestine,” Paul Biggar, founder of the incubator Tech for Palestine, which helped launch UpScrolled, told me.

Biggar, an Irish computer scientist, said UpScrolled, as opposed to other social media platforms, is “human-centric.”

I asked Biggar if the content on UpScrolled was what Tech for Palestine expected, or wanted, when it helped launch the site. Among the examples I saw: a post that claimed to include a “recording of a JEWISH rabbi” — capitalization theirs — “explaining how they drink the blood of children and have their bodies minced and made into food!!”

He said he had not kept up with UpScrolled’s content.

“No one is interested in having their name on a platform that includes that kind of antisemitic imagery that you described,” he said.

Biggar blamed the platform’s “runaway growth” for the proliferation of hate. With all the attention has come “a lot of people f—ing with us,” he said, including rampant bots.

This week, Hijazi, UpScrolled’s founder, also addressed the problem. “No form of racism belongs here,” he said, in a video posted to the app. He promised to expand content moderation teams and upgrade technology to “catch and remove harmful content more effectively.”

Join ‘to upset the Jews’

Hijazi’s message is reassuring. But the problems with UpScrolled speak to a deeper issue with the American pro-Palestinian movement: that factions within it can prioritize demonizing Jews and Israel over helping actual Palestinians.

When Larry Ellison — a longtime Israel supporter — took control of the American spin off of TikTok in late January, angry users fled en masse. Within weeks, UpScrolled became the second most-downloaded free app on Apple’s App Store.

“People who are knowingly and very publicly and unashamedly antisemitic have weaponized UpScrolled to get back at Jews,” an ADL analyst tracking the platform told me. (The analyst asked that her name be withheld, out of concern over potential doxxing and other online threats.) Messages across antisemitic influencer networks explicitly called on users to join UpScrolled “to upset the Jews,” she said.

Those messages suggest that advocating for Palestinian rights and spreading Jew hatred are somehow connected projects. That you can’t oppose Israeli settlements without also questioning whether Jews were actually murdered at Treblinka.

We’ve seen this trajectory before, and it doesn’t end well. The Tree of Life shooter spent hours on the far-right social media platform Gab sharing antisemitic content before murdering 11 worshippers in 2018. Yes, Gab and UpScrolled are on opposite sides of the political spectrum, but the same truth holds for both: The path from online hate to real-world violence isn’t theoretical.

This is poison for Jews — but also for Palestinians. It mires their cause in the oldest hatred rather than in universal human rights. It replaces serious discussions about actual solutions with slogans and memes.

And it sends a very clear message to Jews around the world — heard especially loud and clear in Israel — that Palestinian liberation means Jewish extermination. If anything, this sets the Palestinian cause backward. Any future Palestinian state will need to coexist with an Israeli one. No one is going anywhere. Reinforcing the belief, prevalent in some quarters, that its establishment would mean disaster for Jews will only make that establishment less likely.

The yawning enforcement gap

UpScrolled’s actual Rules and Policies prohibit speech condoning violence, promoting hate or supporting terror groups. But so far the site has not enforced them.

The ADL analyst said she tested the site’s content policy by reporting nine accounts that clearly violated platform terms. None of her reports were acted upon.

“If this platform wants to have an anti-hate speech policy, which they do, it needs to be enforced,” the ADL analyst said.

Biggar said Tech for Palestine will continue supporting the platform “because we keep hearing the right things” about preventing harm.

But he added a caveat: “If ever we felt that UpScrolled did not live up to the human rights-based focus that we have, we would be the first people to say so.”

That moment has arrived. The test isn’t just whether UpScrolled can moderate content at scale — it’s whether its founders and users can imagine Palestinian freedom without devolving into vicious antisemitism. Until they can, they’re not building a platform for liberation. They’re perpetuating the politics that keep Palestinians stateless and Jews under threat.