TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer has quit the company after US President Donald Trump effectively ordered a ban on the app through two executive orders and the app sued his administration over one of them. TikTok confirmed Mayer's resignation to MediaNama. Vanessa Pappas, the current general manager of TikTok, will head the company in the interim period, as per the FT report. Mayer had joined as TikTok's CEO and its parent company ByteDance's COO in May 2020 after having headed Disney's streaming division. The Financial Times first reported the development. Mayer reportedly told TikTok and ByteDance employees about his departure on Thursday via a letter. He cited the "political environment" that has "sharply changed" as his reason for departure. “I understand that the role that I signed up for — including running TikTok globally — will look very different as a result of the US administration's action to push for a sell off of the US business,” he reportedly wrote, referring to Trump's August 14 executive order. The order directed ByteDance to divest from its American assets and it rights to any user data that TikTok gathered in the country, within 90 days. It also directed ByteDance to destroy any TikTok data of US users, and report to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) once all the data is destroyed. The sale of TikTok to a third party will also have to be vetted by CFIUS for all practical purposes. “We appreciate that the political dynamics of…
