Government agency removes spoon emoji from work platform amid protests | TechCrunch
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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

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.

  • Jeena@piefed.jeena.netEnglish
    441·
    8 hours ago

    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.

    • sudo@programming.dev
      209·
      7 hours ago

      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.

  • atzanteolEnglish
    10·
    6 hours ago

    Emojis are characters… They can still be pasted in to text fields…

  • meowmeowbeanz
    14·
    7 hours ago

    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.

    • floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish
      5·
      5 hours ago

      If no one is willing or able to defend constitutional rights, they don’t really exist any more. I hope there are legal cases being prepared at least, to challenge all this new censorship.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      2·
      4 hours ago

      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.