Over the weekend, Elon Musk observed his followers on the X – the platform he spent $ 44 billion to buy – asking if federal employees should be asked to send his team an email with a list of five things they They realized this week. With the votes but over 70%, Musk followed. Federal employees received an email from the US Personnel Management Office (OPM) this weekend, looking for their weekly achievement list by 11:59 pm on Monday.
“In accordance with the guidelines of (President Donald Trump), all federal employees will soon receive an email asking to understand what they got last week,” Musk wrote in X. Failure will be taken as resignation. “
With millions of employees across the federal government, the email address operated by the DOGE and the content of the email were required to flow. While federal employees are threatened with the loss of their jobs, people on social media platforms like Reddit, Tiktok, Threads and Bluesky are calling on each other to spam the email address now with nonsense.
This is a common internet resistance tactic when something comes out as a controversial form of public commentary or email address.
On one occasion, so many people sent the full scenario of “Bee movie”-a repeated internet joke-in a “snitch shape” anti-trans in Missouri that the type line was taken offline. People responded similarly to an inbox state in Texas Tracking gender indicators in driver licenses, as well as a form of anti-trans baths in Utah.
This vigilance of the Internet is sometimes joined within specific communities, as a random K-Pop. In 2020, Dallas police demanded that people send them videos of the illegal activity that occur during protests after the assassination of George Floyd’s police; On the contrary, fans of Korean superstars such as BTS spamed the police department app with nonsense video Fancam.
Trump’s obstacles have used these tactics since the first week of his mandate, when his administration has raised dedicated email accounts demanding that employees report inconsistencies with the president’s executive orders to dismantle diversity, equality and inclusion programs (Dei). Workers were threatened with inaccurate “unfavorable” consequences if they kept information about efforts to “obscure the connection” between Dei Initiatives and government contracts.
Although OPM is a long government agency, these new dedicated specific email addresses are new. Federal employees initially received an email from the OPM email address in January, testing whether it can be used to contact all government employees in an email explosion. This action aroused a lawsuit of the classroom action by two whistlers claiming to violate the federal law of intimacy to create this new email server without following the defined security measures.
These security protocols are in place for a reason. In 2015, OPM was hacked, compromising sensitive data from security background checks for 21.5 million people. This included the social security numbers of each of these individuals, as well as biometric data from 1.1 million people. Meanwhile, it has been given unprecedented power and widespread access to these low resistance government systems.
It is unclear how effectively the Doe will be prevented from this massive spam campaign. Since ordinary people do not have e-mail address .gov, it is possible that the Musk team can simply filter their boxes for email addresses only for the government. Inbox can also collapse under the large volume of the mail to receive; If the Musk’s Doge team is using a physical server, then the amount of data it may contain is finite.
Although it is possible that these efforts can be in vain, people who resist musk policies are not prevented – after all, it doesn’t take long to copy and climb the full “Bee movie” scenario in an email .
