Millions of Instagram users have been sharing photos of their pets as part of a trend which promises to plant a tree for each picture posted.
But so far, nobodyhas been quite sure who will actually be carrying out the pledge.
It seemed like a fun idea at first and filled feeds with adorable photos of animals with an eco-friendly message, but the origins of the tag remained unclear, leaving users baffled.
The trend may be nothing more than participation bait, where people jump on an inaccurate trend which doesn’t have any meaning behind it, WalesOnline reports.
Photos of cats, dogs, tortoises and a variety of other animals have been shared to people’s stories, along with a sticker showing how many people have participated, with over four million photos being posted.
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But it begs the question, who is planting all the trees? Where has this all come from?
A company called Plant A Tree Co came forward late last night and lay claim to the viral sticker, but said they quickly realised the post was growing at an unfeasible rate.
In an Instagram post, the company said: “We deleted it ten minutes later. Even though we deleted it, the stories continued to spread out of our control.”
Plant A Tree Co is an e-commerce site selling bracelets for which they promise a tree planted in exchange.
The stickers usually say who started the sticker, but as Plant A Tree Co tried to delete the post it seems Instagram removed the credit.
With even less context, Instagram users had no way of checking whether trees would actually be planted.
Instagram has now responded, telling The Independent, “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.”
They added that they were working on a way to make it more clear to users.
The “Add Yours” sticker is part of a new Instagram roll out at the beginning of the month which allows story threads; say one person shares a picture of a sunset with an add yours sticker, another user can click the sticker and add their own sunset picture and so forth.
It is a nice idea except when used in a campaign format like this, as there was no way of tracking it back to see who started the sticker and promised to plant all these trees.
It is not helped by the fact that there are now various versions of the sticker flying around one with a dog emoji, one with a cat emoji, and others, recognisable by the different number of shares.
For instance, the one with the dog emoji seems to be the original, with over four million shares, while the one with the cat emoji has ten thousand.
Plant A Tree Co concluded their statement on Instagram by saying: “We want to use this awareness for lasting impact”, but indicated it would not, in fact, by planting four million trees.
However, the company has now started a fundraiser for £745,468.67 to be able to do so.
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