Twitter’s new guidelines state that you’ll get in trouble for making fun of old people

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Twitter is about to do away with one of the best recent memes, “Ok Boomer,” with its updated rules against hateful content. Now any tweets deemed to “dehumanize” others on the basis of age, disability, or disease will be removed from the platform if reported, and the account responsible presumably put in Twitter time-out.

Twitter’s hateful content guidelines already include any language that dehumanizes based on religion and other protected groups like race. They were introduced to address tweets that have the potential to cause real-world effects.

As the company continues to make these changes and monitor how users react, they note that their team “is more prepared to handle cultural nuances” such as the “ok boomer” meme.

Here are some examples of tweets that would fall under the new guidelines, which went into effect yesterday, March 5

Image: Twitter

The thing about this change is that Twitter here is using “when reported to us” as the metric for removal, and not relying on some automated system. With the platform’s issues surrounding bots, dogpiles and abuse of the reporting button, maybe something should be done automatically when the tweet is made. Some kind of holding function where an AI sorts potentially abusive tweets into a queue for moderators to approve before the tweet is posted might work.

Anyway, be careful with any age-based disses in the future, ok?

What do you think? Surprised Twitter is cracking down on the “ok boomer” phrase? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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Joe Rice-Jones

Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience at KnowTechie, SlashGear and XDA Developers. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere, with particular focus in gadgetry and handheld gaming. Shoot him an email at joe@knowtechie.com.