TikTok Chief Operating Officer V. Pappas is leaving the company after nearly five years.
“To our amazing community of creators, employees, & people who have made TikTok ‘the last sunny spot on the internet’, it has been an absolute privilege to serve you all & to be a part of this once in a lifetime journey,” Pappas wrote on Twitter.
Pappas, who has had a number of senior roles at TikTok over the past five years, previously spent nearly eight years at YouTube, according to her LinkedIn page.
Asked to comment, TikTok shared a copy of a staff memo from CEO Shou Chew, who said that Pappas will remain a strategic advisor to the company. The company didn’t name a successor to Pappas, but TikTok did make a few other managerial changes.
Adam Presser, who has been chief of staff, will become TikTok’s head of operations. Zenia Mucha, a former Disney executive, joins the company in the new role of chief brand and communications officer.
TikTok is a unit of China-based ByteDance. The company’s ownership structure remains a point of contention in Washington and elsewhere. Critics assert that ByteDance could use TikTok to spy on American users or subject them to political propaganda. While the political rhetoric seems to have cooled recently, there remains a possibility that TikTok could ultimately be banned in the U.S.
Chew challenges the notion that TikTok is fundamentally a Chinese company. He has said that TikTok is based in Los Angeles and Singapore, not Beijing, and pointed out that TikTok itself isn’t available in China. He has said the company has never shared—or been asked to share—U.S. user data with China. And he has pointed out that 60% of the equity in the parent company is owned by global institutional investors, including Sequoia, General Atlantic, and
BlackRock,
with another 20% owned by employees, including “thousands of Americans.”
Write to Eric J. Savitz at [email protected]
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