“The United Nations replaces all 193 country flags with LGBT flags.”
It’s Pride Month, but the United Nations didn’t replace its country flags with LGBTQ+ flags
If your time is short
- The United Nations in New York didn’t replace its member country flags with pride flags, a spokesperson said.
- A photo used to support this claim was taken at Rockefeller Center in New York City in 2019.
LGBTQ+ Pride Month is celebrated each year in June, but recent claims that the United Nations building in New York has decked out its flagpoles with rainbow flags are wrong.
“The United Nations replaces all 193 country flags with LGBT flags,” reads a June 8 Instagram post showing several flagpoles with pride flags snapping in the wind in front of a tall building.
This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
U.N. spokesperson Shirin Yaseen told PolitiFact that the image wasn’t taken in front of the United Nations building but at Rockefeller Center, about a mile away.
“The only flags that are placed in front of the United Nations building are the flags of the 193 member states plus two observer states plus the organization flag,” Yaseen said.
A reverse-image search of the image in the Instagram post led us to the same photo on Wikimedia Commons. According to the site, the photo was taken in June 2019.
We rate claims the post shows pride flags outside of the United Nations building this year False.
Our Sources
Instagram post, June 8, 2023
Wikimedia Commons, File:Regenbogen fahnen Rockfeller Plaza.JPG, June 29, 2019
Interview with Shirin Yaseen, public information officer, United Nations, June 16, 2023
