Somewhere in the vast, noisy commons of the internet, a woman shared a video about losing weight and was met with the old cruelty that strangers so readily offer to strangers. What followed is the quieter and rarer part of the story: another crowd of strangers, about half a million people organized as The Kindness Mob, gathered around her with messages of support in the same volume the harassment had arrived. CBS News, through Steve Hartman's reporting, places this moment as a small sign that people who have been wounded online are not always left alone with the wound, and that ordinary people
After Cruel Comments Over a Weight Loss Video, One Woman Finds a Flood of Support From Strangers
A woman was bullied with hate comments after posting a weight loss video online.
Cruel messages first, then a flood of kind ones from people she did not know
Mark
So what actually happened to this woman?
Mimi
She posted a video about her weight loss, and people responded with hate comments. Then members of The Kindness Mob sent her a wave of support.
Mark
And who are they?
Mimi
A group of roughly half a million people, according to CBS, who help online strangers recover from that kind of harassment.
Luke
Let me mark what we don't know. We don't have her name here, and we have none of the comments or her own words.
Mark
Is the half-million figure solid?
Luke
It's CBS's description of the group. I don't see any independent count or explanation of what counts as a member.
Mimi
Still, the size says something. Cruelty online often feels like a crowd, and this is a crowd answering back.
Mark
What would you want to learn next?
Luke
How the group chooses whom to help, whether it's organized or loose, and whether the support lasts beyond one wave of messages. None of that is in what we have.
Mimi
And Steve Hartman's piece frames her as one example, so the full segment likely holds more of her story.
Der Puls
- A single weight loss video drew a wave of hate comments from strangers, turning a personal post into a target.
- The Kindness Mob, roughly 500,000 members strong, moved to meet that cruelty with a flood of support.
- The response works by matching the volume of harassment with an equal volume of kindness, without waiting for platforms to act.
- The woman now stands at the center of a broader question about whether organized kindness can grow into a lasting counterweight to online hate.
Somewhere in the vast, noisy commons of the internet, a woman shared a video about losing weight and was met with the old cruelty that strangers so readily offer to strangers. What followed is the quieter and rarer part of the story: another crowd of strangers, about half a million people organized as The Kindness Mob, gathered around her with messages of support in the same volume the harassment had arrived. CBS News, through Steve Hartman's reporting, places this moment as a small sign that people who have been wounded online are not always left alone with the wound, and that ordinary people can answer contempt with care.
The story is brief, but its shape is clear. A woman posted a video about losing weight, and strangers answered with cruelty. Then a different group of strangers answered back.
The group is called The Kindness Mob, a community of about half a million people whose purpose is to help those who have been hurt by hate comments. It gathers around a target of harassment and sends support in the same numbers that the harassment arrived.
Steve Hartman of CBS News went to meet the woman. For her, the first messages were cruel, and then came a flood of supportive ones from people she had never met. The report does not name her or quote the comments, and it leaves out how she felt and how the group chooses who to help. Those details may sit in the full segment.
What remains is the scale of it: half a million ordinary people choosing to be kind to someone they will never meet, a response to online harassment that does not depend on platforms alone. The open questions are whether efforts like this keep growing, and how the platforms respond.
The segment is short on detail, and what it offers is this: a woman posted a video about losing weight, and strangers on the internet answered it with cruelty. Then a different group of strangers answered back.
The group is called The Kindness Mob. CBS News describes it as a community of about half a million people whose purpose is to help people recover from hate comments left by online strangers. It works as a counterweight, gathering around a target of harassment and sending support in the volume that harassment usually arrives in.
The woman at the center of this report was bullied after she shared her weight loss video. The piece does not name her in the material available here, and it does not quote any of the comments she received. What it does establish is the shape of what happened to her: cruel messages first, then a flood of supportive ones from people she did not know.
Steve Hartman, who reports the "On the Road" series for CBS News, went to meet her. His segment treats her as one example of what the group does, a way to show the effect of the mob's help on a single person rather than describe it in the abstract.
The report gives no specifics on how the group picks the people it helps, how it organizes its members, or who runs it. It also does not say how the woman felt before or after, or what she said to Hartman. Those details may be in the full broadcast segment, but the written summary does not carry them, and they are not filled in here.
What the story does make plain is the scale. Half a million people is a large number to be organized around the idea of being kind to someone they have never met. It also suggests a response to online harassment that does not rely on platforms alone: ordinary users acting together to answer it.
What to watch next is whether community-led efforts like this keep growing, and how social media platforms respond to organized campaigns of kindness aimed at people who have been targeted.
Möchten Sie die ganze Geschichte?
Das Original lesen bei CBS News ↗
Climate & Environment