UpScrolled has added Irish language support to the social media platform, its founder and chief executive Issam Hijazi said on Wednesday .
On Wednesday, the Palestinian Australian said his app now supported Irish, English, Arabic, Spanish, French, German, Dutch and Italian.
"Adding Irish is another step towards making UpScrolled a more inclusive space where people can connect and express themselves in the language that feels like home," he said.
Mr Hijazi said he considers languages to be central to the ideas of identity and community.
"Recent national research found that 73 per cent of those under age 35 in Ireland want to improve their Irish (known as Gaeilge), reflecting a language being carried confidently into new spaces," UpScrolled said in a news release.
What is UpScrolled?
UpScrolled made its debut in June of last year. Its developers said the platform was founded because of bias against those seeking to promote issues relating to Palestine on social media.
"What began as a response to the silencing of Palestinians has become a refuge for many others who feel marginalised by mainstream platforms," a blog entry on UpScrolled's website read at the time.
During Israel's military campaign in Gaza that followed the Hamas attacks of October 2023, social media apps such as TikTok, Instagram and Facebook appeared to censor certain posts relating to the Palestinian enclave.
Some activists accused platforms of algorithmic bias.
"For Issam, a Palestinian-Jordanian-Australian, this was not an abstract frustration or a passing trend," read a January post on UpScrolled's website.
"Watching his people be erased in their homeland while the digital space narrowed around them created a tension he could no longer sit with."
The app quickly rose to the top of mobile download charts in the months after its release. Various reports indicate that UpScrolled has between one million and five million active users.
Originally based in Australia but later moving to the Netherlands, the social media app has said it seeks to fight misinformation by exposing "bots, fake accounts, deepfakes and organised propaganda – regardless of viewpoint".
Controversy and changes
UpScrolled has not been without controversy. It has been accused of taking too lax an approach to content moderation, possibly making it a place where hate-speech goes unaddressed.
For unknown reasons, the app was briefly removed from Google's mobile app store, Google Play, but was quickly restored after complaints.
"The momentum our amazing community is building here is incredible," an announcement from UpScrolled read.
This year, the company announced that its social platform had been banned in Saudi Arabia, although the reasons for that, too, remain a mystery.
"We're reaching out through official channels to find a path forward," read UpScrolled social media post in February.
The company finished its move to Netherlands in June, because of the country's "highest digital safety standards".
In June, UpScrolled marked its one-year anniversary.
"Together we showed the world that our collective voices matter and are not meant to be silenced or censored," the caption accompanying a video showing various Palestine demonstrations said.
