Flags in the feed

And how this signals the increase of online logics into political life

If you drive around the small town of Royston, in the UK’s Hertfordshire countryside but close to Cambridge and London, you quickly see a huge number of lampposts festooned with Union Jacks and St George's flags. The BBC names Billy Crotty, a tree surgeon, as the person responsible for the near-300 flags that line the road. He is quoted as saying, “We just wanted to make a stand for our country. We're proud to be English," and says that the reaction has been "99% positive."

This official story is a surge of patriotism, but of course this is not how it is felt by many in the community, such as restaurateur Akbar Hussain, who says, "We're a little bit panicky. We're a little bit worried about what it all means for us."

Arguably, a decade ago, the received wisdom was that protest had moved online and the concern was about the rise of superficial engagement (or ‘clicktivism’), where users feel a sense of accomplishment from liking or sharing posts, but it rarely translates into meaningful political participation. A study by the Pew Research Centre found that while 66 per cent of users engage with political content, only a fraction participate in offline activities such as attending meetings, voting, or volunteering for campaigns. This apparent disconnect between online engagement and practical action was a source of concern about the effectiveness of social media as a tool for genuine involvement and engagement.

Flags as offline feeds

But surely there is something oddly ‘online’ about the display of flags. While each individual flag might not seem like much on its own, when you see dozens or hundreds lining a street, the sense is akin to posts on social media: one post might go unnoticed, but a constant stream grabs attention.

This copy-and-paste pattern, the same image repeated over and over, arguably mirrors how content spreads online. Media researcher Limor Shifman describes how internet memes rely on repetition to create impact. But while memes online often invite playful reinterpretation, in Royston the repetition is designed to reinforce a particular meaning, not open it up. The St George’s Cross isn’t being debated in a way that offers new ideas and framing, but, like a viral post that appears in every feed, the flags create saturation, with a particular dominant meaning rather than dialogue.

This is where cultural theorist Nathan Jurgenson’s concept of an “augmented society” is useful. He argues that online and offline life aren’t separate spheres, but are fused, constantly bleeding into each other. This means that what we’re seeing is political signalling ‘in real life’ that is shaped by the aesthetics and dynamics of the internet. As academics José van Dijck, Thomas Poell, Martijn de Waalargue argued as far back as 2018, contemporary protest is shaped by the infrastructures of platforms - including the incentives they create for visibility, repetition, and emotional intensity.

More recently, political theorist Paolo Gerbaudo argues that social media enables a particular ‘choreography’ where symbolic cues are substitutes for the formal organisation of party politics. The flags are what Gerbaudo would see as staged political performances that are governed by viral cues and group signalling that is informed through online conventions.

That said, it's important not to treat the aesthetic logic of repetition and symbolic saturation as fundamentally new. Northern Ireland has long provided a template for how flags and symbols structure political belonging. Here, flags signal territory, identity, and control, policing who belongs where. While these practices long predate the internet, social media seems to be accelerating and amplifying the same logics. Offline symbolism doesn’t disappear in a digital age; it gets accelerated and reformatted.

In fact, a three-year study of Hungary’s Fridays for Future finds that online and offline activism form a mutually reinforcing cycle: frontstage visibility and backstage organising develop in parallel, each fuelling the other. If we translate this to flag politics, the pattern seems clear: flags put up offline produce online content; the content drives more flags; the loop intensifies emotion and surveillance, on both sides.

Part of this intensification is the act of watching and being watched. In some areas, residents who remove flags have reported being filmed or photographed, their actions shared and condemned in local Facebook groups or Telegram channels. This echoes the online tactics of doxxing or brigading: public shaming, exposure, and a low-level form of digital policing. The aesthetics of online protest spill over into the affective economies of intimidation and control.

The fragility of online logics

However, if we continue to import the logic of online, we can see how this also imports its vulnerabilities. For example, just as hashtags can be hijacked, so too can flags. A famous example came in 2020 when the #WhiteLivesMatter hashtag, originally launched to undercut the Black Lives Matter movement, was overwhelmed by activists posting K-pop fancams, GIFs, and random videos, rendering the hashtag incoherent and unusable. This tactic, known as hashtag flooding, disrupted the intended message through saturation and absurdity.

A similar kind of subversion played out offline in Blackburn, where filmmaker Aeman Afzal created a spoof video that quickly went viral. Styled like a patriotic propaganda reel, it shows a man triumphantly painting a St George’s Cross on a roundabout, declaring “We are taking back our streets” only to be told he’s painted the wrong flag. He’s actually painted the Danish flag by mistake. Afzal, who is British Pakistani, said the film was about challenging division through humour. Just like flooded hashtags, the video disrupts symbolic certainty: it shows how even the most rigid displays can be re-coded, reframed, and given different interpretations.

What the Blackburn spoof seems to indicate is just how much the power of a symbol depends on everyone treating it seriously. As Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner argue, symbols gain force not simply because of what they depict, but because of the collective seriousness people attach to them. It’s like an unspoken agreement: the flying of this flag stands for something important, and we all act accordingly.

But the moment you introduce humour, irony, or even a simple mistake, that seriousness starts to be less certain, and the solemn performance becomes absurd. Once the emotional grip is loosened, the meaning of the flag becomes more open to different interpretations. This is precisely what meme culture does so well: it shows how even the most forceful images can lose their power when their seriousness is disrupted.

Back to Gerbaudo, he argues that digital platforms have shifted political parties away from deliberation and programme (the logic of parties), towards emotional expression and symbolic branding (the logic of digital platforms). The resulting ‘platform politics’ demands a constant performance of visibility, in order to resonate like a meme or a trending hashtag. But the strength of this visibility is also subject to the mechanisms that mean it can come with fragility, as in a world where political identity is constructed by internet logic, reputation and recognition can also be fleeting.