Kim Farrell, TikTok’s global head of creators, is leaving the company, Business Insider has learned.
Farrell joined TikTok nearly six years ago, starting on the company’s Latin America marketing team before shifting to its operations division and later taking over as global creator lead in late 2023. In December, she helped organize TikTok’s first awards show for creators at the Hollywood Palladium theater in Los Angeles. Prior to TikTok, Farrell worked in marketing at Booking.com and Google.
Her departure was announced internally on Wednesday, as the company informed staff that it was reorganizing its content division, which includes employees who work with creators, publishers, and other content partners. As part of the reorg, the company is merging its creator and publisher teams into one and letting go of 20 US staffers and some other roles globally. Business Insider was unable to learn the full count of global job cuts.
“We are realigning our global content operations team as we continue to accelerate the growth of high-quality content and key content verticals,” a TikTok spokesperson told Business Insider.
Media publisher Status earlier reported on the layoffs.
Farrell’s exit follows a string of executive shake-ups and reorgs across TikTok over the past year and a half.
TikTok Shop US operations lead Nico Le Bourgeois left the company in May. Blake Chandlee, TikTok’s advertising leader, stepped down in March as part of a reorg that put the sales team under the oversight of its global monetization product technology division. TikTok’s global head of marketing, Kate Jhaveri, left the company in September 2024. Some of the company’s reorgs have shifted power away from local leaders toward executives based in China or Singapore, Business Insider previously reported.
TikTok’s content team reorg comes at a moment of flux for the video platform.
CEO Shou Chew told workers in December that it plans to spin off parts of its US business in a joint venture with an investor group that includes tech company Oracle and investment firms Silver Lake and MGX. The new entity will have oversight over some aspects of the business like data security, but key business lines like e-commerce and advertising will remain under TikTok’s global owner, ByteDance, according to Chew’s memo. The US product is supposed to remain interoperable with the rest of the world.
The deal is expected to close later this month, Chew said in the memo.
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