There’s Been a Surge in Anti-Monarchy Posts Online Since the Queen’s Death

There has been a surge in anti-monarchy sentiment posted online in the wake of Queen Elizabeth II’s death and King Charles III’s accession, with a spike in people in the UK using the hashtags #abolishthemonarchy and #notmyking.

The entire world has been reporting on the Queen’s death, with users online reacting with everything from condolences to calls for the end of the Commonwealth. Many people have been frustrated by cancellations of events during the 10-day national mourning period. They have also highlighted Britain’s colonial legacy, and questioned why republicanism is being so heavily policed IRL.

On the day the Queen died there were 6,776 tweets globally using the hashtags #abolishthemonarchy or #notmyking, according to analysis of Twitter data by VICE World News. Before the Queen's death, only a small number of accounts were posting using either hashtag.

But by the 9th of September that had become 43,773, peaking on the 13th of September with 54,467 mentions of the hashtags, suggesting people were reacting to events after the Queen’s death.

Of these tweets, British users made up the biggest proportion of posters. Having only mentioned #notmyking 193 times on 8th of September, on the 13th of September nearly 13,000 tweets were posted by accounts from accounts registered in the UK using the hashtags.

On TikTok, #NotMyKing shot up from 191,000 views globally on the 9th of September to 5.1 million as of the 15th of September – and #AbolishTheMonarchy moved from 17.4 million views to nearly 28 million. 

Several of the republican videos feature a speech given by the UK’s new Prime Minister Liz Truss, who said she wanted to abolish the monarchy as a young politician. 

Separate data from Crowdtangle, a social monitoring platform, showed that on Facebook and Instagram, interactions around posts featuring the hashtag #abolishthemonarchy spiked on the 8th of September and remained higher than the pre-death average for the rest of the week. An interaction is a reaction to, comment or share of a social media post. 

A third of all 33,000 Facebook interactions this week with pages posting about #abolishthemonarchy took place on the day the Queen died, the Crowdtangle data shows. 

In the week after her death, there were also over 158,000 interactions on Instagram with the #abolishthemonarchy hashtag, and over half of those were on the 8th of September.

Of the 20 top Instagram posts on the topic, at least 15 came from UK-based accounts, many of which usually promote socialist ideas.

Meanwhile the Crowdtangle data also shows that the tweets with the highest number of interactions under #abolishthemonarchy which included a geotag were almost entirely from accounts registered in the UK. 

Only a fraction – around 15-20 percent – of all online content posted has a geotag affiliated with it, meaning it is not possible to determine the location of all users. 

Republic, a British press group campaigning to replace a hereditary monarchy with a republican constitution, has posted #NotMyKing with nearly all of its posts since the Queen died, and has driven a high number of mentions and picked up new followers too. 

Across all platforms, there are few copycat posts, which suggests authentic online behaviour rather than organised platform manipulation.

Google Trends also shows that worldwide searches about abolishing the monarchy were still much higher than normal by the end of the week.