Meet the TikTok ‘Kindness Mob’ using online piling-on for good
Laura Tigeleiro, who lives on Staten Island, New York, used to dread opening TikTok. Living with multiple sclerosis, which causes one of her eyes to droop, she found her videos routinely targeted by cruel comments. “Everyone was making fun of my eye,” she says. “I just wanted to share healthy recipes, and maybe make some friends. But they said terrible things. It really hurt.” That changed last March, when one of her videos suddenly attracted more than 15,000 supportive comments. “I didn’t know what was going on. I was shocked,” she says. She later learned she’d been targeted — not by trolls, but by the Kindness Mob.
The Kindness Mob is the creation of Kansas City digital marketer Tyler Brickley, who launched the project in 2023 and has since built a following of roughly half a million. Each day he directs his audience toward someone being bullied or ignored online and asks them to flood that person’s page with supportive comments. “It’s a form of trolling,” he says of the approach, which he describes as “hijacking the machinery of online harassment” — coordination and anonymity — and redirecting it toward kindness. “And I gotta say, it works.”
The science behind the swarm
Yale social and natural science professor Nicholas Christakis says the project taps into what researchers call “social contagion theory,” in which behaviour spreads between people much like a virus. “This type of online behaviour is wonderful, but of course, we need more,” he says, suggesting the mob could be a first step toward larger cultural change. Christakis, author of Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, argues that humans evolved as much for cooperation as for conflict, and that social media’s anonymity and engagement-driven algorithms distort that balance. His own research backs the ripple effect Brickley has observed: “You are kind to Susie, Susie’s kind to Betty, and Betty’s kind to Tommy,” he explains, meaning kindness can pass along a chain of people who never directly interact.
The effects have reached beyond Tigeleiro, who says TikTok began paying her once her follower count grew, enough to help her family buy a car. “I dreamed of a better life, and Tyler gave me that chance,” she says. Grandmother Renee Penick credits the mob with giving her strength while sitting at her husband’s hospital bedside, while musician Nocturne says the attention helped launch her upcoming tour. Brickley insists the focus should stay on the people being supported rather than himself: “We’re not the point of the story. The point is to remove the distraction… so the person’s content can shine through.”
A heavy, unpaid burden
Running the account has taken a toll. Brickley says TikTok paid him just $39 in August despite organising around 350 mobs to date, and he’s had to turn away dozens of daily nominations he can’t act on. After back surgery last autumn, he discovered his wife had quietly posted about him online — he awoke to his own wave of support. “I just realised this is real. It can really help,” he says. Data and Society researcher Alice Marwick cautions that similar projects often burn out within a year or two, though she welcomes the underlying idea: “I like the idea of amplifying pro-social behaviour online.” For Brickley, the mission feels bigger than its lifespan. “It feels like a calling,” he says.
Source: BBC News