Elon Musk polled his followers on X, the platform he purchased for $44 billion, over the weekend to find out if federal workers should be obliged to give his team an email listing the five tasks they completed this week. Musk followed through after more than 70% of the votes were in favor. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) sent out an email to federal employees this past weekend asking them to submit their weekly list of accomplishments by Monday at 11:59 p.m. ET.
Musk shared on X
“Consistent with [President Donald Trump’s] instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week,”. “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
The DOGE-operated email address and its contents were certain to leak because the federal government employs millions of people. People on social media sites like Reddit, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky are urging one another to bombard the now-public email address with pointless content as federal employees face job loss threats.
This is a typical online opposition strategy when anything like an email address or contentious public comment form leaks.
In one instance, so many individuals sent the whole script for the popular online comedy known as the “Bee Movie” to a Missouri anti-trans “snitch form” that the tip line was shut down. Both a Utah anti-trans bathroom complaint form and a Texas state inbox monitoring gender marking changes on driver’s licenses elicited comparable responses from the public.
Online vigilantism can occasionally come together in specific communities, such as the K-pop fanbase. Following the police execution of George Floyd in 2020, Dallas police asked citizens to send them films of unlawful conduct occurring during protests. Instead, fans of Korean celebrities like BTS flooded the police department’s app with absurd fancam footage.
Since the first week of Trump’s presidency, when his administration established specialized email accounts asking staff members to report noncompliance with the president’s executive orders to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, his critics have used these strategies. Employees who failed to disclose attempts to “obscure the connection” between DEI programs and government contracts faced vague “adverse consequences.”
