'We use a form of trolling': The internet vigilantes who show up to save you from bullies

Social media is often seen as a mirror for human cruelty. One man built a TikTok army of 500,000 to fix it. Their weapon: kindness.

Everyday, Laura Tigeleiro of Staten Island, New York, would open TikTok to sea of hatred. "Everyone was making fun of my eye," she says.

Tigeleiro has multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease that's made one of her piercing blue eyes droop sideways. "I just wanted to share healthy recipes, and maybe make some friends," she says. "But they said terrible things. It really hurt." Then, last March, her phone exploded, and everything changed.

One of her videos had gone viral, with over 15,000 friendly comments. "I didn't know what was going on. I was shocked," says Tigeleiro. Days later, she figured it out: she was under attack by the Kindness Mob. 

The Kindness Mob is a TikTok channel run by Tyler Brickley, a digital marketer from St Louis, US, who started the project in 2023. "It's a form of trolling," he says. Every day, Brickley points his half-a-million followers at someone who's being bullied or overlooked, and has them flood the target with kind comments. "We're hijacking the machinery of online harassment," like coordination and anonymity, and using them for benevolence. "And I gotta say, it works."

There's something more interesting here than people being nice. When the mob descends, the bullying often stops, sometimes forever. It's an example of what scholars call "social contagion theory", where positive or negative behaviour spreads from person to person like a virus. Leading researchers tell me Brickley's movement demonstrates how we might change the tide not just of an internet platform, but perhaps an entire culture.

"This type of online behaviour is wonderful, but of course, we need more," says Nicholas Christakis, professor of social and natural science at Yale University. "It's possible that this Kindness Mob is creating an opportunity for people to take initial steps towards the more substantial contributions we'll have to make if we're going to correct the deficiencies in our society."

"On January first 2023, I was thinking about momentum," says Brickley. "It just feels like a lot of people leaving negative comments don't really mean it," says Bickley. They're following a crowd.

"That was the lightbulb moment," Brickley says. "I thought, what if I start a channel where I get 10 people in a little club, and we flood the comments with positivity to tip the scales?" 

Ten was modest. By Brickley's count, he's organised 350 mobs, and the average video gets a thousand comments. Successful posts generate tens of thousands or more, and pull in millions of views. In one recent mob, the celebrity socialite Paris Hilton joined in. 

Often, the mobsters discover they love the account they're attacking and stick around. It changes people's lives.

Renee Penick, a grandmother from Ohio, US, says she was at her husband's hospital bed when the Mob visited. It gave her strength in a crisis and built an entire community around her videos. Nocturne, a musician from upstate New York, says the........

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