Who is the Instagram account pledging to plant 4.2m trees?
And will they be able to plant them all?
Last updated 9th Nov 2021
A viral Instagram trend which promised to plant a tree for every pet photo posted now seems incredibly unlikely to happen.
More than 4 million pictures have been uploaded since the feature was added at the beginning of the month, despite the post only being uploaded for 10 minutes
The firm behind the campaign - Plant A Tree Co - says they deleted their original post after realising it had gone global.
On Instagram Plant A Tree Co said: "We immediately realized the post would grow too big and that we didn’t have the resources to plant that many trees, so we deleted it 10 minutes later. Even though we deleted it, the stories continued to spread out of our control."
The trend started as a sticker was posted on the environmental organisations Instagram, with a caption that encourages users to add their own image attached to the sticker.
Stickers add a small image or line of text to a post, and on November 1 Instagram rolled out the "Add Yours" feature - which allows users to reshare and create their own post with a sticker as part of a public thread.
Although they won't be planting the trees, Plant A Tree Co have pledged to use the traction to "actually plant 4 million trees".
A fundraiser has been started for American charity Trees For The Future, which the environmental organisation claim to have no affiliation with.
There is a £745,000 target for the fundraiser, with £6,700 being raised in less than 16 hours.
A spokesman for Meta, Instagram’s parent company which recently rebranded from Facebook, said: “The ‘We’ll plant one tree for every pet picture’ trend shows the power of the Instagram community to raise awareness on important topics.
“Like all other ‘Add Yours’ sticker threads, it was started by an independent Instagram account – not Instagram.”
The “Add Yours” stickers are supposed to show their original author when clicked on, except in some cases, such as when the creator deletes their original post, or if their account is private – but the PA news agency understands Meta is working to make these cases clearer.
Not their first Instagram campaign
Plant A Tree Co has previously used Instagram campaigns to raise money, once pledging that reposting its content on a personal story would generate 0.01 US dollars for a charity.
One of these campaigns lead to nearly £2,000 being raised for Human Rights Campaign in support of Pride Month.
A since-deleted May 2019 post, found on archiving website archive.org, shows the page then encouraged followers to "repost on your story to plant 100 trees".
The post had over 918,000 likes with the pledge that they would plant the trees by 2020.
Since starting their website in 2019, Plant A Tree Co claim to have planted 6500 trees, but their website does not state where.
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