The idea is simple: If people are being mean to each other online at a rate of once every 60 seconds, we would create something that’s nice to people even faster. To do that, we looked to spam messaging – something that, itself, is considered so negative that Twitter doesn’t even allow it. But we figured we could change that. So we created the NiceBot: the first-ever use of spam for good. It’s an automated Twitter bot that sends out one nice message to users on Twitter – at a rate of once every 30 seconds. And eventually, it will reach every single person on the platform. All 300 million of them.

The NiceBot launched in October, just in time for anti-bullying month. The code that powers it pairs one random, pre-written nice message with one random Twitter user. The NiceBot then sends out the message, and then, 30 seconds later, moves on to the next person. And it never stops tweeting. In addition to living on Twitter, we 3D printed physical NiceBots and sent them to celebrity influencers who have taken a stand against bullying. Each physical NiceBot is powered by a Raspberry Pi and 4G enabled, and displays all of the nice tweets as they go out in real time.

The results were overwhelming. We’ve organically reached over 9 million people in 76 different countries, with 850,000 engagements, over 550,000 mentions, and still going strong. The NiceBot was featured in all of the major advertising publications, but also broke into the mainstream by being profiled on TechCrunch, Upworthy, the Huffington Post, the Today Show, and many others. It was even named one of the best ‘bots of 2015 by Slate.com. But most importantly? 99% of the people we’ve tweeted at have responded positively. With each tweet and positive response, we’ve brightened the day of hundreds of thousands of people and made them think long and hard about the huge impact small amounts of positivity can have. In this way, we’ve hopefully helped to curb online bullying and negativity, staying true to our client Champions Against Bullying’s mission statement to make the world a nicer place.