Slava Ukraini: Exploring Identity Activism in Support of Ukraine via the Ukraine Flag Emoji on Twitter

Identity Activism, a new phenomenon emerging from the massive popularity of social media, consists of the prominent display of a social movement symbol within space reserved for description of the self. Here we introduce and explore this concept, asking: What is the trajectory of engagement in Identity Activism in response to historical events? As an initial case, we present a timeline of engagement in Identity Activism regarding the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. With user profile data from January - June 2022, we visualize Identity Activism through the prevalence of the Ukraine flag emoji in US Twitter bios. We find that beginning on February 21, Ukraine flag emoji prevalence increased approximately 30-fold over the course of six days, moving from least prevalent out of 121 flags to third most. The prevalence has only declined slightly since, maintaining an average 30 times higher than pre-February 21.