TikTok confirmed on Tuesday the departure of one of its key safety executives as regulatory scrutiny and calls for ban mount on the short-video platform.
Eric Han, the head of US trust and safety, is set to leave the company on May 12, a TikTok spokesperson confirmed to CNN. The news arrives as TikTok struggles to win the trust of lawmakers across the US and Europe, where concerns regarding the firm’s handling of personal information of citizens have overshadowed the app’s potential.
Han has been part of TikTok since 2019. He supervised various initiatives at the firm, including enhancing content moderation and reducing election misinformation. In December, Han was named the head of trust and safety for TikTok’s US Data Security (USDS), a separate division set up to pacify apprehensive lawmakers and prevent the app from being banned in the country.
Under the USDS initiative, data of US users will be stored on servers managed by local tech corporation, Oracle. The development, however, has done little to allay security concerns.
TikTok has been facing intense regulatory scrutiny since its parent company ByteDance confirmed that some of its staff based in China could access European user data. The highly popular short-video platform has since been banned on government devices in almost half the US states, the UK, EU institutions, Canada, and New Zealand.
In the US, lawmakers have taken a particularly defensive stance against TikTok, with some members of the government calling for a nationwide ban against the platform.
Concerns have been raised regarding ByteDance’s potential transfers of sensitive user data from both sides of the Atlantic to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under the country’s strict laws. TikTok has repeatedly stated it takes data protection and privacy seriously, but its reassurances have apparently failed to pacify the lawmakers.
