“It feels like a calling”: The internet vigilantes who weaponise kindness
BBC/ Serenity Strull/ Getty ImagesSocial 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 Kansas City, 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."
Harassing for good
"On 1 January 2023, I was thinking about momentum," says Brickley. "It just feels like a lot of people leaving negative comments don't really mean it". 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 1,000 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 mob brought her so many new fans that she's about to go on tour.
After Brickley turned his army on Tigeleiro, she gained so many new followers that TikTok started paying her. She says she made enough money to buy her family a much-needed new car.
"I dreamed of a better life, and Tyler gave me that chance," Tigeleiro says. "I owe it all to him, but he'd disagree with that."
Brickley, meanwhile, goes out of his way to keep the work hidden from the Kindness Mob's targets. "We're not the point of the story. The point is to remove the distraction, to get all these hateful comments out of the way so the person's content can shine through."
Contagious compassion
When people talk to me about the darkness that's so familiar online, they describe the internet like a mirror – a system that simply reflects the natural cruelty of the human spirit.
However, Christakis says that's a misread of what's happening on social media.
"Yes, we humans evolved to be mendacious and tribal, and evil and harmful," he says. "But equally, we evolved to be good; to manifest qualities of love and friendship, and kindness and teaching."
As Christakis argues in his book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, these good qualities must outweigh the bad in our natural state. Otherwise, humans would have learned to live in isolation rather than in societies where we're constantly exposed to each other.
"Social media hijacks these ancient, friendly, pro-social qualities", he says, both by introducing anonymity, and through algorithms that highlight conflict and strife to drive engagement and keep us staring at our phones.
In other words, Christakis says the Kindness Mob's work is sidestepping the perverse influence of social media and encouraging a more "natural" kind of pleasant interaction. After all, most adults wouldn't waltz into a stranger's house and insult their appearance, the way so many people do in the comments of a video.
It could have positive knock-on effects. "We showed experimentally that you can create these cascades of kindness," says Christakis of his research. "You are kind to Susie, Susie's kind to Betty, and Betty's kind to Tommy. So, how Betty treats Tommy depends on how you treated Susie, even though neither you nor I ever interacted with Betty or Tommy."
On an internet that can seem filled with nastiness, Christakis says the Kindness Mob has stumbled onto a solution that's backed by science. When people stop engaging with trolls and connect with each other instead, research shows that trolls may change their behaviour.
Someone, however, needs carry the burden of orchestrating all the kindness.
The kindness burnout
In September 2025, Brickley's following grew from 30,000 to 200,000 all at once. "It was very exciting," he says, but it came with a toll. "One day I was staring at my phone, and I thought, I just I can't do this."
The project isn't lucrative. TikTok pays accounts with big followings, but in August, Brickley says he made $39 (about £29). Instead, he's driven by a sense of personal responsibility.
Everyday, fans nominate anywhere from 20 to 100 people for potential mobs with a form on the Kindness Mob's website. But the audience's attention is finite and Brickley only posts one mob a day.
"It means there are 20 people showing up on my doorstep every day," Brickley says, all of them suffering from deliberate cruelty. "And I have to turn 19 of them away, and the next day there's 20 more." Eventually, the burden was so overwhelming he had to take a few months off.
To release some of the emotional weight, Brickley had to reframe the project in his mind. He couldn't directly help each person in need, but the mob could pick one each day to use as a lesson. He also organised some volunteers to share logistical work.
"I've been studying internet culture professionally for two decades, and things like this have a very limited shelf life," says professor Alice Marwick, director of research at the Data and Society Research Institute. "Usually, the person behind them gets burned out in a year or two and it goes away."
Social media platforms bear a huge responsibility for user behaviour, Marwick says, but you can't just blame algorithms.
"What we need is a larger shift in social norms around how we treat people online," she says. "I like the idea of amplifying pro-social behaviour online. Whether or not it moves the needle much remains to be seen."
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Last autumn, Brickley had back surgery. "When I woke up, my wife was being all cagey and weird. Finally, she said, 'Just check your phone'," he says. She'd stepped outside the hospital room to post a TikTok. Brickley himself was being mobbed.
"There were like 1,000 comments. I was reading through them, just sobbing. Ugly crying," Brickley says. "I just realised this is real. It can really help. So many things crystallised for me in that moment." He's gone back to the comments time and again for strength.
"It feels like a calling," Brickley says. "The Kindness Mob is just one step. But kindness, for everyone, always, feels like a good place to start.
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