SHANGHAI (Reuters) – A major transformation is unfolding within TikTok’s safety team, as the social media platform embarks on a restructuring journey that involves global staff layoffs within its trust and safety unit responsible for content moderation. This development was disclosed by three sources familiar with the matter on Thursday.
According to two sources, Adam Presser, the operations head of TikTok and the overseer of the trust and safety unit, sent a memorandum to employees on Thursday informing them about the impending changes. The process of staff layoffs commenced on the same day for teams located in Asia and Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, as revealed by two of the sources.
Despite these significant changes, TikTok has not yet responded to requests for comments regarding this matter. The move comes at a precarious time for TikTok, as the fate of the widely-used short video app hangs in the balance. The app experienced a brief outage last month and faced the deadline of a law effective on January 19, mandating its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to either sell TikTok due to national security concerns or risk being banned.
In a noteworthy event from January last year, TikTok’s Shou Chew appeared before Congress alongside Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and other tech and media leaders for a hearing where lawmakers criticized the platforms for not adequately safeguarding children from increasing risks of sexual exploitation. Responding to inquiries from Republican Senator Lindsey Graham during the hearing, TikTok’s CEO committed to investing over $2 billion in trust and safety initiatives.
In a notable move from October of the previous year, TikTok downsized its global workforce, including a significant number of employees in Malaysia, as part of a strategic shift towards leveraging artificial intelligence for content moderation. Notably, TikTok asserts that it employs 40,000 trust and safety professionals across the globe. Reuters was unable to ascertain the full extent of the recent layoffs.
(Reporting by Brenda Goh; Editing by Shri Navaratnam)
