Nathaniel Brown, the former top communications executive at Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) who departed the company earlier this year, has joined TikTok as its new communications chief, The Desk has learned.
This week, Brown started his new role as Global Head of Corporate Communications for TikTok, the short-form video sharing and social media platform owned by China-based ByteDance. Brown will be in charge of all external corporate communication initiatives for the company. TikTok has not issued a statement on Brown’s hiring.
Brown left WBD in January after spending five years with the company. His departure was mutual, according to reports, and came about a month after Axios said the top executives at WBD and Paramount had held a secret meeting about the possibility of merging the two companies — something that ultimately did not happen. Brown was not implicated in the leak of the information to Axios, which was later confirmed by other outlets, but he would have served as the main point of contact for reporters who wanted to confirm details of the meeting.
TikTok has experience similar corporate turbulence over the past year, with the service targeted by American lawmakers and government officials over perceived domestic security threats, few of which have been proven by publicly-disclosed evidence. Still, TikTok found itself in a precarious situation last June when Congress passed a law that required ByteDance to divest its U.S. business or face a banishment in software and app stores. The ban was rolled into an appropriations bill intended to provide military funding to Ukraine and Israel.
ByteDance and TikTok chose to fight against the law in court, but faced numerous legal setbacks along the way. In January, the service was pulled from app stores owned by Apple, Google, Samsung and Amazon after a key deadline passed without the divestiture required by law. The app was restored in mid-February after the U.S. Department of Justice reassured Apple, Google and others that they would not face daily penalties for providing access to TikTok following a moratorium signed by President Donald Trump.
