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Where the “GIFs are for boomers” claim came from
The claim surfaced in the UK’s 2022 Meta–GIPHY merger inquiry. In a submission dated 9 August 2022, GIPHY argued that marketplace commentary and social-media sentiment suggested GIFs had fallen out of fashion, with younger users in particular describing them as “for boomers” and “cringe.” That records GIPHY’s argument; it does not establish how representative those comments were.
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UNILAD sharpened the framing in its 16 September 2022 headline, “If you use GIFs, you’re a Boomer, GIPHY admits.” The headline captured the joke and the viral hook, not the result of a representative survey of age groups.
What the CMA concluded—and what it did not
The CMA considered GIPHY’s comments in its final report, published 19 October 2022. It explicitly declined to rely on them: “However, the CMA has not placed any weight on these comments, as there is no indication that they are representative of social media users.”
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The regulator also said evidence before it indicated that GIFs remained popular and important to social-media platforms. It reported that GIPHY’s most recent traffic volumes were broadly similar to the three-month period from December 2019 to February 2020, the latest comparison period that was both before the merger and before the pandemic. The report’s relevant volume figures are redacted, so they cannot support a precise numerical comparison here.
That assessment was about evidence in a UK merger review and platform traffic in the periods examined. It does not tell us how often Baby Boomers, Millennials, or Gen Z use GIFs today, or establish a pattern across countries and services.
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Why upload figures do not answer the age question
GIPHY’s filing also reported a decline in total GIF uploads between October 2020 and May 2022. The published percentage is redacted. More importantly, uploads measure content being added—not how many people view, share, or respond to GIFs. A change in creator uploads cannot by itself prove that a generation has abandoned the format.
The cited filing and the CMA report do not provide an unredacted, representative comparison of GIF use across the three generations in the headline. They therefore cannot establish which age group uses GIFs most, whether use has fallen among younger people, or why anyone might prefer another format.
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Why GIFs still make sense as online communication
A reaction GIF can work like a small expressive gesture: a familiar face, movement, or scene conveys a response that plain text may not. Gretchen McCulloch discusses reaction GIFs as online emblems in Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (2019), while also noting practical limitations. That helps explain the format’s communicative role, but it is not evidence that one age group uses GIFs more than another.
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How to read the headline without turning it into a statistic
- What is documented: GIPHY made the “for boomers” and “cringe” argument in its 2022 submission.
- What the regulator said: The CMA did not treat the cited comments as representative and said its evidence indicated GIFs remained popular and important to platforms.
- What remains unproven: A generational ranking, a population-wide decline among younger users, or the claim that Millennials and Gen Z are “over” GIFs.
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