Hate Comments Piled Onto Her TikTok for a Month. Then Strangers Buried Them

In March, Kahri Salyars, 28, of King George, Virginia, posted a TikTok video about losing 40 pounds. Hundreds of hateful comments followed, and they kept coming for about a month.¹

Then the tone flipped. A wave of encouraging comments buried the nasty ones. “It was weird because, where are all these really nice people coming from?” Salyars told CBS News.¹

Those people came from The Kindness Mob, a volunteer-run online group started by Tyler Brickley of Kansas City, Missouri. Each day, it picks someone who is being bullied or simply overlooked online and fills their posts with sincere, kind comments.¹³ Salyars eventually learned the group was behind the change. She says her confidence is back. “Positivity overtook the hate,” she told CBS.¹

How a mob gets organized

Brickley launched the group on Jan. 1, 2023. His theory was that the first few comments on a video set the tone, so a burst of kind ones early might head off a pile-on.²

His ambitions were modest. “It was supposed to be ten people and a screenshot,” he told the website North Dakota Nice. The group keeps no formal membership list. Instead, it measures each mob by comments, and those now average more than 750 per featured creator.²

Behind the scenes, Brickley says, a team of about 10 volunteers sorts nominations, puts them through several rounds of review and filters them before he picks who gets mobbed.² The group takes nominations for creators on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube.³

The group calls its followers Mobsters. Their only weapon is the compliment, and the rules forbid delivering it by bot or copy-and-paste. Comments have to be genuine.³

The person on the receiving end usually isn’t told. “We make every effort for them to never find out,” Brickley told CBS.¹ The group itself is public and promotes its work. What stays quiet is the reason a stranger’s comment section suddenly got so friendly.

What the numbers mean

CBS describes the group as about half a million strong and reports that it has helped about 400 strangers since 2023. Both figures come from Brickley.¹ The half-million figure lines up with the group’s own count of people who follow @thekindnessmob, not people who comment on every mob.³ The 400 may include every creator the group has mobbed, including overlooked ones, not only people who were being bullied.

Some results go beyond hurt feelings mended. A recipe creator the group mobbed reportedly grew from about 7,000 followers to more than 100,000. According to Brickley, she used her earnings to buy her family a car.²

A BBC Future feature, reprinted by Asaase Radio, profiled Laura Tigeleiro of Staten Island, New York. A video of hers that had drawn mockery went viral with more than 15,000 friendly comments, and she later worked out that the Kindness Mob was responsible. The feature described the project as a kind of trolling and tied it to social contagion theory, the idea that behavior spreads from person to person.⁴

Where the group stands now

The Kindness Mob Inc. is now a Missouri nonprofit corporation. Its application for 501(c)(3) status, the federal tax exemption for charities, is still pending.³

“It feels outrageous, but that’s exactly what we’re trying to do,” Brickley told CBS.¹ He also explained why the group mobs overlooked creators as well as bullied ones. “The mission is kindness for everyone always, and the ‘everyone’ is the word doing the heavy lifting,” he told North Dakota Nice.²