Instagram to change 'Add Yours' feature after 'pet photos for trees' thread
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Instagram says they are planning to make it clearer exactly who has created 'Add Yours' stickers, after a viral trend is suspected of being a scam.
The 'Add Yours' feature on Stories - which allows users to re-share and create their own post with a sticker as part of a public thread, was announced by Instagram on 1 November.
A scam is a scheme to trick or cheat someone out of something, often money or property.
It is a deliberate plan to mislead a person and fool them into doing what the scammer wants.
Soon after a thread promising "We'll plant 1 tree for every pet picture" caught people's attention and was shared around 4 million times.
But after a while people started questioning who was going to be planting these trees, and when an Instagram account eventually came forward many people questioned whether they were even a real company.
What was the 'Plant trees for pet pictures' thread?
Around 4 million people shared photos of their pets on their stories using the "Add Yours" feature
"We'll plant 1 tree for every pet picture," alongside a dog emoji started being shared across the platform using the new "Add Yours" feature.
Lots of people started sharing pictures of their dogs, cats and other animals in the belief that more trees would be planted as a result.
An account for something called Plant A Tree Co, claimed responsibility for the trend saying they started it to raise awareness. In a post on their Instagram account Plant A Tree Co says as it started to spread, they realised they didn't have the resources to plant that many trees and so deleted it. The sticker then continued to spread without their name.
Newsround has contacted Plant A Tree Co for comment.
What has Instagram said?
Instagram made clear to Newsround that they were not responsible for the original 'pet photos for trees' post and that they have stopped the original thread from being shared.
'The "plant one tree for every pet picture" Add Yours thread was disabled to limit misunderstanding around who authored the original post,' a spokesperson from Meta, Instagram's parent company which recently rebranded from Facebook, said.
The platform also suggested that it was looking into ways of making clear who had started a thread in instances when the name is removed.
'We're working on ways to make authorship clearer and minimise confusion moving forward,' they added.
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