TikTok’s U.S. joint venture said on Wednesday that it was shuttering its Nashville office, a space that housed, in part, members of its content moderation team.
The company laid off 250 employees, according to labor documents filed with the state of Tennessee. The workers there are not represented by a collective bargaining agreement, documents said. The office will close on Oct. 5.
Employees at the office, in the city’s Music Row neighborhood, received emails on Wednesday morning notifying them of the decision, according to a copy of the email reviewed by The New York Times. Several workers who asked to remain anonymous said they had been logged out of their company devices and told that they would receive severance.
Across the social media industry, the task of filtering violent or explicit material is being threatened by artificial intelligence. TikTok did not give a detailed reason for the layoffs.
“We have decided to close our Nashville office to streamline our operations and better align our teams for long-term growth,” a press officer for what is known as the TikTok U.S.D.S. Joint Venture said in a statement.
The office occupied nearly 145,000 square feet of space in the heart of Nashville’s music district. TikTok signed the lease in 2024, and the building, which has more than 230,000 square feet of space, was sold in July for just shy of $147 million.
In January, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, spun out an American venture to operate the popular video app in the United States. The deal was part of an effort to comply with a 2024 federal law that aimed to separate TikTok from ByteDance to address national security concerns over the app’s ties to Beijing.
Under the arrangement, non-Chinese investors own about 80 percent of the American venture. ByteDance will keep 19.9 percent of it. The new venture licenses the app’s powerful recommendation algorithm from ByteDance.
