TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said in testimony before Congress last January that the company would spend more than $2 billion on trust and safety efforts, but layoffs in those areas that reportedly began Thursday suggest a reversal of that strategy.
Reuters reported that TikTok head of operations and trust and safety Adam Presser sent a memo to the company’s staff Thursday alerting them to layoffs in the trust and safety unit as part of a restructuring.
Those layoffs have already begun in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, sources told Reuters.
TikTok’s future in the U.S. remains up in the air, as parent company ByteDance has until April 5 to find a U.S.-based buyer, under terms of an executive order signed by President Donald Trump Jan. 20.
TikTok went dark in the U.S. for approximately 14 hours in the weekend leading up to Trump’s inauguration, which took place on the day he signed the executive order.
The company has reported in the past that it employed 40,000 trust and safety professionals across the globe, and Reuters was not able to confirm the extent of Thursday’s layoffs.
Chew joined Discord CEO Jason Citron, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, X CEO Linda Yaccarino, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at a hearing last January regarding their respective platforms’ failure to protect children from sexual predators.
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