Social media company TikTok could cut as many as 300 jobs from its Irish workforce as part of a restructuring at the Irish headquarters.
The company said the proposed restructuring would allow TikTok to shift internal resources away from legacy frontline tasks and toward higher-skilled, specialised positions.
“We are exploring a reorganisation to strengthen our global operating model for Trust and Safety, including proposals to evolve the way we work to ensure teams remain scalable and agile, the creation of hundreds of new specialist roles here in Dublin and redeployment opportunities, and advancing platform safety through the latest technological innovations,” a spokesman for TikTok said.
The precise number of jobs that will be lost is not yet known. A collective consultation is currently underway, which could lead to the retention of some of the at-risk roles. However, it is expected that the net figure will be 300.
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The company is also proposing to create hundreds of new specialist trust and safety jobs in Dublin, with some of the affected staff likely to move to those new roles.
It also follows a similar reduction in staff numbers announced in March last year at the Irish operation.
TikTok opened its Dublin base in June 2020 with 20 staff. It subsequently announced that its first data centre in Europe would be located here, to house European user data, as part of TikTok’s move to assuage data protection concerns.
The company also has a sizeable content moderation operation in Ireland that looks after content for the EMEA and Latin American regions, and leads TikTok’s user safety strategy and enforcement for Europe and the UK.
The announcement is another blow to Ireland’s tech sector, which has been hard hit in recent months as a series of high-profile job cuts impacted staff here. Meta announced in May that it would reduce headcount in Ireland by 20 per cent, causing the loss of 350 jobs, while Oracle has also signalled it will cut back Irish staff numbers.
