Instagram tree-planting trend fools pet owners

AN INSTAGRAM trend fooled four million users into believing a tree would be planted if they posted a photograph of their pet to the social media platform.

Plant A Tree Co claimed responsibility for the trend, which saw users posting pictures of their animals accompanied by a sticker with the caption: “We’ll plant one tree for every pet picture.”

Stickers add a small image or line of text to a post, and on Nov 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.

Plant A Tree Co claimed it made its sticker as “a fun tree-planting campaign where we can show off our awesome pets”, but more than four million users have since used it and the page said it quickly realised it “does not have the resources” to fulfil the promise.

“We immediately realised 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,” said Plant A Tree Co in a statement on the platform.

The page said it was now taking part in a fundraiser for Trees For The Future, a charity tackling hunger, “so we can actually plant four million trees” – and has raised more than £2,800 so far.

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 for a charity. A since-deleted May 2019 post, found on archiving website

‘We realised the post would grow too big and that we didn’t have the resources to plant that many trees’

archive.org, shows the page then encouraged followers to “repost on your story to plant 100 trees”.

A spokesman for Meta, Instagram’s parent company, 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.”