Flag on government websites not Trump’s nod to the Confederacy. It’s been used since 2017

As thousands of government website pages were taken down or updated in recent days in response to President Donald Trump’s executive orders, many social media users expressed alarm at what they perceived as a shocking change.

"They have literally put a US flag with only 9 stars on it (which is basically a Confederate flag as it represents the first 9 states to secede from the Union) on official government websites," a Feb. 2 X post said, sharing a screenshot of the flag atop a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website. 

A Feb. 3 Instagram post shared a video in which a man said government websites are being updated with the nine-star flag. He said he searched Google and that the flag was the "Confederate First National Flag" and was used by "veterans of the Confederacy."

We found multiple social media posts about the perceived change to government websites.

The Instagram and Threads posts were 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.)

The posts are wrong on two counts:

• The flag icon atop many government websites is not new or unique to the second Trump administration. It was first used in 2017 during Trump’s first term and was used throughout former President Joe Biden’s administration. 

• Civil War historians told PolitiFact that the flag used bears no resemblance to a confederate flag.

(Screenshots from X and Instagram.)

A U.S. General Services Association spokesperson told PolitiFact in an email that the banner atop government websites is part of the U.S. Web Design System’s tool kit. The system helps government teams design and maintain their websites.

The tool kit recommends using the banner with the flag icon to identify official .gov or .mil domains to show the sites have secure HTTPS connections and to identify them as official government sites, the spokesperson said.

The banner hasn’t changed since its first publication in 2017. The number of stars was a design decision based on the flag icon’s limited size, and represents no past or current flags, the spokesperson said.

A State Department spokesperson said the General Services Administration maintains the federal website standards site, which said all government sites should use the federal government banner.

The State Department added the banner Nov. 30, 2020, based on that guidance, and it has remained on the site since, the spokesperson said.

A search of the Internet Archive shows several government websites using the nine-star flag icon before the start of Trump’s second term.

(Screenshot from a State Department website archived March 17, 2021, by the Internet Archive.)

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Civil war historians told PolitiFact that the flag used on the website is not a Confederate flag.

The Confederacy’s first national flag, known as the "Stars and Bars," was used from 1861 to 1863. Some versions of the flag had nine stars, they said.

"It started out with seven stars, one for each of the original states that seceded and formed the Confederacy," Paul Quigley, director of Virginia Tech University’s Virginia Center for Civil War Studies, said. "As more states seceded and joined the Confederacy, more stars were added to the flag." 

Those stars were arranged in a circle, not horizontally as seen atop the government websites. The Confederate flag also had one white and two red bars, far fewer bars than the government flag icon.

Because the flag’s similarity to the traditional Stars and Stripes caused confusion on the battlefield, the Confederacy in 1863 switched to the Second National Flag, known as the "Stainless Banner," Quigley said. That flag arranged 13 stars in a St. Andrews Cross.

Scot Guenter, director of the Flag Research Center, a Houston-based group, said the flag icon on U.S. government sites is not an actual flag used by the government or the Confederacy, and was simply a design choice.

"Unfortunately, ramifications of using a variant of the true national flag that is just made up by an artist for looks didn’t even occur to whoever did this," Guenter said.

Kevin Levin, an author and historian, told PolitiFact he noticed many Bluesky social media users, including prominent people he respects, sharing the Confederate flag claim. He wrote two articles on Substack, an online platform for writers and journalists, debunking the claim.

Levin wrote that many people defending the claim pointed to a photo of a flag for sale on a website called Historical Americana Co. That flag had nine stars arranged horizontally and nine stripes. The site described it as a "post Civil War re-union UCV Flag."

UCV stands for United Confederate Veterans, a group that was formed in 1889 and dissolved in 1952. Levin wrote that the veterans group did not create its own flag, and no promotional material from the group shows the flag offered for sale.

Levin told PolitiFact that he’s never seen that flag before, nor have any experts he’s asked in recent days. Quigley also said he had not seen that flag before.

"I can say with confidence that it's not a Confederate veterans flag at all," Levin said.

Shae Smith Cox, a Texas A&M University assistant history professor who researches the Civil War, said that the flag for sale appears to be homemade and created for a United Confederate Veterans reunion, possibly during the "memory phase" of the Confederacy, when she said Union and Confederacy groups competed over how the Civil War would be remembered.

"There were no regulations on what people could create for that phase," Smith Cox said. 

The flag’s seller estimated the flag is from 1900 to 1920, which would be in that era, Smith Cox said, adding that 1913 marked the Battle of Gettysburg’s 50th anniversary. 

Social media posts claimed that the Trump administration, while updating federal webpages, added a nine-star flag representing the Confederacy atop each website. 

The flag icon has been used on government sites since 2017, said a spokesperson for the General Services Association, which guides federal website standards. The flag had only nine stars because of space, and it has no relation to any current or past U.S. flag, the spokesperson said.

Civil War experts told PolitiFact the nine-star flag bears no resemblance to Confederate flags. The first Confederate national flag had a varying number of stars corresponding with the number of states that had seceded from the union. Some versions had nine stars, but they were arranged in a circle, not horizontally like the government website flag.

We rate the claim False.