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Six weeks ago, as TikTok grappled with escalating tensions between the United States and China, the social media app\u2019s top executives huddled together to figure out their next steps.<\/p>\n
Vanessa Pappas, 41, was worried. TikTok\u2019s North American business, which she has run since 2018, was dealing with an uproar. President Trump had threatened to ban TikTok because of its Chinese owner, ByteDance, and many of the more than 100 million people who use TikTok in the United States were up in arms.<\/p>\n
So in the early hours of Aug. 1, Ms. Pappas recorded a 59-second video from her home office in Los Angeles to calm the creators on TikTok and its fans. \u201cWe\u2019ve heard your outpouring of support, and we wanted to say thank you,\u201d she said in the video<\/a>, which quickly went viral under the hashtag #SaveTikTok. \u201cWe\u2019re not planning on going anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Ms. Pappas is now repeating that message as she lands in an even hotter hot seat. Last month, Kevin Mayer, TikTok\u2019s chief executive, said he was leaving the company, citing its uncertain political status. Ms. Pappas was appointed TikTok\u2019s interim global head, just as the app faces an even murkier future.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Under an executive order from President Trump, ByteDance must essentially strike a deal to sell off TikTok\u2019s U.S. operations by Sept. 20; it will have a few weeks after that to close a sale. Yet after weeks of negotiations with potential buyers such as Microsoft, Walmart and Oracle, the discussions were thrown into disarray when the Chinese government signaled that it would weigh in on TikTok\u2019s future.<\/p>\n In a recent 30-minute interview over Zoom from her home, Ms. Pappas said TikTok\u2019s predicament was \u201cunique\u201d and described what it was like to navigate it through \u201ca challenging time.\u201d She declined to discuss specifics about TikTok\u2019s deal talks and said she was not involved in them.<\/p>\n Instead, Ms. Pappas said, she is focused on what TikTok\u2019s future could look like if the app\u2019s ownership is bifurcated. Most of all, she said, she is doubling down on putting TikTok\u2019s community of creators and users \u2014 ranging from those who post videos of cake decorating to those who break dance \u2014 first. Ms. Pappas later added that she regularly talked to Zhang Yiming, ByteDance\u2019s founder and chief executive, about all of these issues.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n To focus on its community, TikTok in July formed a Creator Fund, where creators can earn cash for views, starting with $200 million. And with the pandemic forcing people indoors for the foreseeable future, Ms. Pappas said she and her team were working on making TikTok an uplifting place to visit. Last month, the company launched a largest national advertising campaign on television and digital media, highlighting more than 30 popular creators under the tagline \u201cIt starts on TikTok.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve built this product for hundreds of millions of people, and we\u2019re not looking for that to change,\u201d said Ms. Pappas, a former YouTube executive.<\/p>\n But keeping TikTok\u2019s community happy in such a turbulent period may be challenging. Some creators and fans have been rattled by Mr. Trump\u2019s moves against the app. Since his executive order, people in the United States have installed TikTok about 6.5 million times, down 13 percent from a year earlier, according to Sensor Tower, an app analytics firm.<\/p>\n Competitors have also pounced. Facebook introduced Reels, a TikTok clone inside Instagram, in August. The social network has also doled out millions of dollars to some of TikTok\u2019s biggest stars to lure them over to using Reels.<\/p>\n Ms. Pappas said she wasn\u2019t worried about Facebook and Instagram Reels. \u201cYou can certainly copy a feature, but you can\u2019t copy a community,\u201d she said. \u201cI think that\u2019s really hard to replicate.\u201d<\/p>\n Tom Keiser, chief executive of Hootsuite, a social media management company, said TikTok was right to make its power users a priority.<\/p>\n \u201cThey need to be investing in those folks,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s so many things out of their control, but their future growth is based on influencers and content creators continuing to evolve and grow and leverage the new capabilities TikTok is rolling out.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Ms. Pappas has worked in the online influencer world since some of its earliest days. Half Greek by birth, she grew up in Australia and speaks with an Aussie twang. She moved to London when she was 20, and eventually migrated to New York. In 2007, she joined Next New Networks, a company that helped web video creators earn money from their efforts.<\/p>\n YouTube bought Next New Networks in 2011. Ms. Pappas joined YouTube and quickly rose through the ranks. She was YouTube\u2019s first audience development lead, a role that led her to connect with video makers. Her division at YouTube developed and popularized the term \u201ccreator\u201d and helped transform video blogging, or vlogging, into a full-time job.<\/p>\n Ms. Pappas also wrote a book, \u201cThe YouTube Creator Playbook,\u201d on how creators could make money from their followings, in 2011. She went on to develop YouTube\u2019s Creator Academy, an educational content portal that teaches creators how to build a business on YouTube, and a channel certification program, which teaches creators about digital rights management, legal issues and advanced analytics.<\/p>\n TikTok lured her from YouTube at the end of 2018 to be its general manager and head of North America, based in Los Angeles. At the time, TikTok had just expanded globally. It was a new challenge for Ms. Pappas, who said she had wanted to get in on the ground floor of the next big creator movement.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was this burgeoning community that resonated as this next evolution of what the creator meant and redefined the creators over again,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Young people flocked to TikTok, which made it easy for them to create videos with a robust mobile-first suite of video editing tools. Lip-syncing videos and others soared in popularity.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n