The news: TikTok is tightening its ties to parent company ByteDance, reshaping leadership just as Washington and Beijing seemed close to a deal on the app’s US future. The global content and distribution teams—previously overseen by Western executives—will now report to Fiona Zhi, ByteDance’s product chief and a key architect of its Chinese sister app, Douyin, per The Information.

Zhi has brought other Douyin executives over to TikTok since moving there herself in 2023, and is close with ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming and CEO Liang Rubo. Some internal meetings are reportedly now held in Chinese, with real-time translations for non-Chinese staff—a change that some employees say complicates collaboration.

TikTok’s internal memo described the overhaul as a bid to “enhance efficiency and accelerate growth,” but the restructuring also centralizes almost every major function, from ad sales to ecommerce, under ByteDance veterans close to Yiming.

Why it matters: The move effectively restores full ByteDance control, undoing years of efforts to empower Western managers—and suggests that a US TikTok deal could still be far away.

• Advertisers are uneasy about who will ultimately run TikTok US—and how stable the platform will be throughout the transition. Agencies told Digiday that clients are already reevaluating Q4 budgets amid leadership turnover and governance uncertainty. Some plan to shift spend temporarily to Meta or Google until TikTok’s US algorithm, data policies, and ad tools prove stable.
• Fragmentation is the biggest concern. If TikTok divides into separate US and international ecosystems—or must retrain its recommendation engine—marketers expect short-term performance drops.