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We Can’t Post Our Way Through the Climate Crisis
A viral Instagram sticker got millions of users to participate in shallow climate action — but, could it have worked?
At least 4.1 million people participated in an Instagram viral trend on November 9 and 10. Post a picture of your pet and somehow, someone is going to plant a tree. The viral challenge grew exponentially, even though the climate activism offered little details of its follow-through.
We know now that this challenge was a shallow gesture, a misunderstanding of Instagram’s stickers and later the original poster admit to the inability to keep their promise of activism.
It was later revealed that this account holder had a history of these mistakes in the past. It seems in this case that 23 year old entrepreneur Zack Saadioui was trying out the brand new “sticker” feature from Instagram and due to “a glitch,” the sticker remained shareable long after the original experiment.
Freelance journalist Patrick Marlborough did a deep dive debunking of Saadioui’s past and found that even in order to plant these trees, it would require users…
