Some American TikTok Employees Are Leaving for Meta and Google

According to a report by American media on January 24 (Friday), the uncertainty surrounding the future of the social media platform TikTok, owned by a Chinese company, has led to some of its American employees leaving and choosing to join other companies.

Since July 2024, over 800 TikTok employees in the United States have reportedly resigned, as per The Information.

A recent analysis by Live Data Technologies shows that about 10% of the departing TikTok employees have moved to Meta Platforms, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook. Live Data Technologies has been tracking the job transitions of these individuals through publicly available work change information.

In the past six months, the turnover rate of TikTok employees in the United States, which is the ratio of the number of resignations to the total number of employees, has been nearly double that of major tech companies such as Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

Apart from Meta, TikTok employees also seem inclined to join Google and Amazon. Some employees have also chosen to work for companies like Walmart, DoorDash, OpenAI, and Passes.

TikTok did not respond to requests for comments on this data.

As of 2023, TikTok reportedly had a workforce of 7,000 employees in the United States. Despite President Biden signing a bipartisan bill in April 2024 that banned TikTok, the management of TikTok has instructed employees to continue operations as usual.

The law gave ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, 270 days to sell its controlling stake in TikTok. However, even though several American companies have made acquisition offers, ByteDance has refused to discuss the possibility of selling TikTok.

Furthermore, TikTok has requested its management to continue interviewing for new positions but cautioned them against speculating with job applicants about potential outcomes after the ban is enforced.

TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. U.S. lawmakers believe that the Chinese Communist Party could use TikTok to gather personal information from Americans to facilitate espionage activities and utilize TikTok’s algorithms for targeted propaganda. TikTok denies that Beijing has any control over the app.

Legal battles for TikTok have reached a critical point. On January 17, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Congress’s TikTok ban. This ruling initiated a countdown, and subsequently, tech giants like Apple, Google, and Oracle ceased providing applications, websites, and related services for TikTok in the United States on the 19th.

Due to the TikTok ban having very clear provisions for “qualified divestiture,” the President must enforce the law passed by Congress.

President Trump was inaugurated on Monday, January 20, and signed a presidential executive order delaying the enforcement of the TikTok ban for 75 days. This was done in the hope of “protecting national security while avoiding the sudden shutdown of communication platforms for tens of millions of Americans.” It is currently unclear what specific measures President Trump will take regarding TikTok.