A mailman, a NASA scientist and a park ranger: Some government employees shrug off TikTok bans
Emmanuel Jean-Pierre is an aspiring writer who’s planning to release his first novel for young adults later this year.
Emmanuel Jean-Pierre is an aspiring writer who’s planning to release his first novel for young adults later this year. And, at least for now, he’s a letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service who’s hungry for a regular creative outlet.
And for that he turns to TikTok, where he’s known as Manny the Mailman and is a budding star in the online community known as #mailtok, a hashtag with 24.5 million views.
Jean-Pierre, who’s from Morristown, New Jersey, has attracted 215,500 followers on the video app where most days he posts from his mail truck during his lunch break. The videos cover subjects ranging from how to spot junk mail to the time a colleague had to deliver a package of live snakes.
“There are a lot of people who don’t know anything about the post office besides that we deliver mail,” he said. “This kind of becomes something different that shakes up my schedule.”
It’s also something that Congress is making increasingly difficult, as government workers like Jean-Pierre are caught in the middle of a geopolitical fight between the United States and China over digital surveillance and foreign control of the media that now reaches millions of people daily.
Rating: 5