Red Flag Emoji 🚩

About

Red Flag Emoji 🚩, also known as "Triangular Flag on Post" or "Triangular Flag," is an emoji approved in Unicode 6.0. In October of 2021, the emoji became popularly used in posts accompanying statements the poster would interpret as a "red flag," or warning sign. The trend was possibly inspired by the Red Flags In My Room trend on TikTok.

Origin

The "Triangular Flag on Post" emoji was added to Unicode 6.0 in 2010 and Emoji 1.0 in 2015.^[1]

While the emoji has consistently been used to symbolize a warning sign, or "red flag," since its debut, a particular trend of pairing multiple red flag emoji with a warning sign began growing popular on Twitter in September of 2021. One of the first tweets of this nature to see significant spread was posted September 23rd, 2021 by user @Jordan773,^[2] who tweeted, "Black women with all white friends?" with the emoji, gaining over 1,300 retweets and 4,500 likes (shown below).

The trend was possibly inspired by the September 2021 "Red Flags In My Room" trend on TikTok, in which people discussed various "red flags" on the app.

Spread

While "red flag" tweets appeared on the app over the following weeks and received modest engagement numbers, red flag emoji tweets became a site-wide phenomenon following an October 12th, 2021 tweet by the official Twitter account^[3] which read, "I'm not on Twitter." The tweet gained over 26,000 retweets and 173,000 likes (shown below, left). This proved a catalyst for multiple brands on Twitter to pick up on the trend, usually as a means to hype up their own product. For example, @BRFootball^[4] posted the meme with the phrase "football is not a real sport," gaining over 4,500 retweets and 37,000 likes (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References