By Jay Peters , a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to th

Elon Musk is directing harassment toward individual federal workers

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2024-11-23 10:30:02

By Jay Peters , a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

Elon Musk is, in addition to many other things, now the co-lead of the currently nonexistent Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) advisory group. Now, before it even gets rolling, he has begun singling out individual government employees he says are emblematic of the government’s bloat and posting about them to his hundreds of millions of followers on X.

Earlier this week, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal, the X user “datahazard” shared a screenshot on X highlighting the role of Ashley Thomas, the Director of Climate Diversification at the US International Development Finance Corporation, saying, “I don’t think the US Taxpayer should pay for the employment” of that role. Musk reposted it, adding the comment “so many fake jobs” in a post with more than 33 million views.

As the WSJ notes, Musk’s followers have responded in exactly the way you’d expect: with a flood of memes and harassment targeting Thomas, whose LinkedIn and Facebook pages are now private. Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, told the WSJ that the posts “are aimed at sowing terror and fear at federal employees.”