Nobody is planting a tree if you share a pet picture on Instagram. Here's why

You may have noticed people posting pictures of their dogs or cats on their Instagram stories as part of a recent campaign promising to plant trees for every picture posted. You may have even posted one yourself. 

More than four million people have added pictures of their pets to their Instagram stories as part of a social media campaign that used a new Add Yours sticker feature released by Instagram last week. The sticker created by the Instagram account behind the campaign claims "We'll plant 1 tree for every pet picture."

But who is the "we" behind the post and is anyone planting millions of trees? The answer is complicated. 

Instagram debuted a new feature earlier this month, a sticker it said could be used to create public threads in Instagram Stories, another feature that allows users to share content.

Since the Add Yours sticker feature went live last Monday, an Instagram page belonging to an organization called Plant A Tree Co. created a sticker and began using it for a campaign that promised to plant a tree for every pet photo users shared.

The campaign quickly blew up and millions of people, including celebrities like actresses Sarah Hyland and Lili Reinhart, got in on the trend, using the sticker and sharing photos of their pets.

But over the weekend, suspicion began to mount. Users wondered who was behind the campaign and if they would actually plant millions of trees.   

On its website, Plantatreeco.com claims to have "planted over 6,500 trees to date" and has a stated goal of planting one million trees by the end of 2021. The website says that in order to plant trees, they are selling necklaces and that the sale of one necklace funds the planting of one tree.

On Tuesday, Plant A Tree added a post to its Instagram brand page titled "Who's behind the anonymous tree planting post?" with an image showing that the sticker had been used more than four million times.

The post said the sticker from the Add Yours feature was a "fun tree planting campaign" but that they removed the post very quickly.  

"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," the post said. 

Despite what Plant A Tree said were attempts to end the campaign, the post continued to spread through the stories of millions of Instagram users. 

Plant A Tree said in its post that Instagram "stripped" their credit from the post, thus hiding where it originated.

A spokesperson for Meta, Instagram's parent company, told CBC News the Plant A Tree sticker was disabled to limit misunderstanding around who authored the original post. Meta is the company formerly known as Facebook after a recent rebranding.