According to a New York Times report, on Thursday, the U.S. government’s General Services Administration (GSA) removed the spoon emoji as an option that users of its videoconferencing platform can select to express themselves.
The move comes a day after workers embraced the digital cutlery to protest the Trump administration’s “Fork in the Road” resignation offer.
From the outside it’s funny to see how fast America is becoming like China. But I feel for you guys, and in the long run nothing is funny about it, only in the short.
China for all its faults has a functional government, growing economy and rule of law is strictly enforced. Would we be so lucky to become like China. The US is spiraling towards becoming like post soviet Russia.
Comparing one authoritarian country to another and having an answer other than “both are bad”… I guess at least China has socialized medicine so you won’t die from ingesting boot polish.
Comparing one authoritarian country to another and having an answer other than “both are bad”
Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Israel are all “authoritarian” but wildly different societies. Merely labeling them as “authoritarian” and leaving it at that is short circuiting your reasoning skills.
Oh splendid, the spoon gestapo’s here—scrubbing dissent one forking emoji at a time. Musk-Trump synergy in full clown mode: delete the 🥄, bury the evidence, pretend the resistance never happened.
Imagine feeling threatened by a utensil. These chuckleheads nuked spoons faster than a toddler bans broccoli. ”Fork in the Road”? More like ”Fork You”—but labor’s serving petty defiance with a side of Slack rebellion.
Keep licking that boot, boys. When your dystopian flowchart includes emoji purges, maybe the problem isn’t the spoons—it’s the rotted system they’re scooping out. My status? Still a shovel.
dicks spoons out for harambe free speech 🥄🥄🥄
Seems like a violation of their first amendment rights. The government is not a private company.
When the government is acting as an employer, they mostly aren’t constrained by the First Amendment in the way that they are when acting as the government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exceptions
Restrictions based on special capacity of government
As employer
The government is not permitted to fire an employee based on the employee’s speech if three criteria are met: the speech addresses a matter of public concern; the speech is not made pursuant to the employee’s job duties, but rather the speech is made in the employee’s capacity as a citizen; and the damage inflicted on the government by the speech does not outweigh the value of the speech to the employee and the public. Specifically, speech is “treated as a matter of public concern” by reference to the “content, form, and context of a given statement”. The exception with regards to balancing the harm of a statement and the value of the statement (the Pickering test) is done by considering the degree to which the speech either interferes with close working relationships, disrupts the office, or even has the potential to do either.
Most on-the-job speech is probably going to fail the “pursuant to the employee’s job duties” test.
