Cyberbullying charity Cybersmile put internet trolling in the spotlight in a ground-breaking way. Over 24 hours, we manipulated influencer Chessie King’s appearance in response to real negative comments in a live Instagram story.

She became uglier in response to each comment, culminating in a shockingly distorted final image. Ultimately, we showed the internet that ‘Trolling is ugly’.

The campaign started with a post on Chessie’s Instagram about body confidence. The post got over 150,000 views in the first 12 hours. We then co-created content with Chessie throughout the following day, in response to genuine negative comments from online trolls.

This content was posted as a series of photos and videos to Chessie’s Instagram Story. With each post, Chessie became more and more distorted, eventually appearing in an unhuman-like form: an amalgamation of the Insta-haters comments.

On 12th April, it was revealed that Chessie’s alien-like transformation was in fact a collaboration between us and The Cybersmile Foundation, with people being directed to their website for help and advice.

News of our campaign spread like wildfire, hitting headlines online and offline in a matter of hours. Through hashtag strategy and management this combined voice is now in every social channel surrounding the Cybersmile platform. And it’s still growing.

With no paid for media support, there were 33 pieces of news coverage, on a global scale, within 24 hours, to an online readership of 1.72 billion. Press outlets included Independent, Daily Mail, Metro, Huffington Post, Business Insider, MSN, The Sun and Cosmopolitan.

The estimated coverage views was 6.95 million, with 2.38k social shares.

Chessie appeared on BBC London News, reaching an additional viewing figure of 617k.

Over 300,000 people followed the Instagram story live, with (thousands) of overwhelmingly supportive comments made in response. At its peak we had 306,220 viewers following the Instagram story live, 5 times higher than Chessie’s average stories.

Most importantly, Cybersmile saw a 70% uplift on post engagements on their Facebook page and an influx of messages from people inspired by the campaign.

We wanted to unearth and expose the pain caused by cyberbullying, in an environment where it naturally breeds. What better place to do this than Instagram platform?

By working with Chessie, a body positive influencer, we wanted to create a movement that sparked conversation, outrage, and a united rallying cry.

We wanted to hold up a mirror to trolling; while the trolling was ugly, the response was beautiful. We turned the negative into a positive, creating a groundswell of support.

43% of UK secondary or high school children have been exposed to online abuse and one in four have suffered repeated incidents. But no one is talking about it.

It is a common form of bullying for this age group, especially among young women, and can lead to depression, low self-esteem, low self-confidence, self-harming, social isolation and, in the worst cases, suicide.

Our brief was to shine a light on some of these issues, raising awareness for Cybersmile, and the support that they offer.