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Voice of Reason, Ice-T, Wants to Murder the New Twitter Hearts

"I used to favorite comments to let y’all know I see them… I WON’T be hitting this HEART… Just sayin."

If you’re one of Twitter’s 307 million active monthly users, you already know two things to be irrefutably true: First, that rapper-turned-talk-show-host Ice-T is the only person worth following on that thing. And second, that the site recently switched its one-click pity affirmation system for the socially inept from “favorites/stars” to “likes/hearts," effectively throwing their business and possibly even civilization into a bottomless trash hole from which it will never escape.

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The move, which rolled out this week, sent users into an existential crisis. Many were very reasonably outraged, and concerned about how a free service changing a cute 10-pixel symbol to a slightly different 10-pixel symbol would affect not only their own lives but the progress of civilization. Places like the Huffington Post, Fortune, The Guardian, NPR, The Atlantic, and more devoted some essential words measuring the impact of this seemingly insignificant but actually world-shattering change in articles that were not at all wastes of thoughts and time.

After a long 24 hours of carefully measuring his thoughts on the issue, Ice-T jumped into the conversation and rendered all other opinions moot.

First, he kicked things off with some Seinfeldian observational “what is the DEAL with these hearts?”-type of convo starter.

WTF is up with these Twitter Hearts?????

— ICE T (@FINALLEVEL) November 4, 2015

Uh oh. Ice is not a dude you want to piss off on the internet. He is very public about airing his gripes and thoughts about everything from hood-etiquette to The Walking Dead to inspirational quotes from forgotten Brad Pitt movies. (He very seriously is the only Twitter user worth a shit.)

Then he followed up with this:

I used to favorite comments to let y’all know I see them… I WON’T be hitting this HEART… Just sayin.

— ICE T (@FINALLEVEL) November 4, 2015

A heart boycott from Ice? The man has faved over 37,000 tweets. This feature is truly doomed without his endorsement. But the sleeping giant was only beginning to awaken:

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Change ISN’T always good…. #TWITTERHEART

— ICE T (@FINALLEVEL) November 4, 2015

Then things got confusing for a minute:

I’ve still got the STAR on my phone…. YES.

— ICE T (@FINALLEVEL) November 4, 2015

Maybe Twitter developers made an exception for Ice? Anyway, let’s see why he’s not down with the hearts…

Hey… I love the ladies.. But I just can’t hit the HEART on my homies Tweets.. Lol

— ICE T (@FINALLEVEL) November 4, 2015

Uh, hm. Well. Maybe he’s just being playful here. Surely, something as innocuous as a red heart could not be perceived as being decidedly unmanly, right? Let’s see his final word on the matter…

— ICE T (@FINALLEVEL) November 4, 2015

Well, there you have it, we guess. Heart shit, get shot. It should be noted, though, that despite his gripes, Ice has since faved—sorry, liked—two tweets, begrudingly granting them with his despised hearts:

Even Gary the Jerk got a heart, leading us to believe that Ice-T’s opinions on heart dispersion are evolving. Maybe the Body Count frontman will come around on this issue after all.

Thank you for following this development in the greatest debate to divide our generation since what color The Dress was.

Dan Ozzi is on Twitter and has very serious opinions about the hearts vs. star wars - @danozzi