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.
dicksspoons out forharambefree speech 🥄🥄🥄
It’s just cold out right now…
Shut up.
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.
formatting
Seems like a violation of their first amendment rights. The government is not a private company.
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.
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.
Emojis are characters… They can still be pasted in to text fields…
❔❔❔
So it’s not so much a fork in the road as it is a chopstick.
🚫🥄
☑️🔪
There really should be a pitchfork emoji.
If they want forks, they’ll get forks. Just not in the road.
Edit: I should have said, “fork in the chode”. It was right there.
there’s also not a traffic cone emoji. Not that related, but I swear there was one.
Time for the knife emojus, I suppose.
The ides of March is coming up. Just saying.
O----
Oh come on, seriously? That is just so so sad and petty
There is no spoon.
I just don’t have the spoons for this.
Could always sub with a spork.
Oh, FORK YOU Trump!
Salad Fingers has entered the chat.
