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High school girl’s response to ‘Ugly Girls’ poll inspires positive reaction

This brave high school student stood up to her school’s cyberbullies.

Lynelle Cantwell/Facebook.

Lynelle Cantwell had a response on her own Facebook page.

Lynelle Cantwell is in 12th grade at Holy Trinity High School in Torbay, Newfoundland and Labrador (that's Canada).

On Monday, she found out that she had been featured on another student's anonymous online poll entitled "Ugly Girls in Grade 12," along with several other classmates.

Cantwell responded via Facebook with her own message, which has already been shared more than 2,000 times and counting.

cyber bullying, bullies, kindness

The unkind poll.

Lynelle Cantwell/Facebook.

Take a look:

bullying, brave response, community support

“Just because we don’t look perfect on the outside does not mean we are ugly.” - Lynelle Cantwell.

Lynelle Cantwell/Facebook.

Since posting her brave response on Facebook, more people have come out to show support than people who voted in the first place.

Check out some of the responses:

appreciation, confidence, self esteem, love and support

Some responses to her post.

Lynelle Cantwell/Facebook.

The School District of Newfoundland and Labrador has announced that it will be looking into the incident further. For Cantwell, the positive outpouring of love and support vastly outweighs the initial cyberbullying and is raising her confidence in new ways.


This article originally appeared on 08.20.17

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A Twitter account that spreads nothing but niceness? Yes, please.

Rumor has it that something mean is posted on Twitter every 60 seconds.

But let's be real — it's probably more often than that. Even if it were only as often as every 60 seconds, that means someone is receiving a negative, insulting, or aggressive tweet that could at best annoy them and at worst truly hurt them every single minute. Welcome to the world of cyberbullying.

But what would it look like if niceness were just as prevalent online as meanness is?

Meet The NiceBot.


The brainchild of Champions Against Bullying and Deutsch Inc. advertising agency, @TheNiceBot is a Twitter account devoted to tweeting nothing but compliments and kind thoughts to people throughout the day. Every 30 seconds to be exact.

The project's goal is to eventually reach all 300 million Twitter users, one by one.

NiceBot uses a program to select Twitter users at random and send them prewritten positive messages — kind of like spam for good.

Deutsch Executive Creative Director Jeff Vinick told AdAge:

"We started thinking about different ways to be nice to as many people as possible, and a spambot seemed like a good solution. And while spam is normally thought of as something negative, we figured that if the message was simple and positive enough, people would respond favorably—and maybe even be tempted to spread some niceness themselves."

Sure, the spammy, randomized nature of the account might make for a few awkward tweets, like this one to Bill Cosby (yikes)...


...but who wouldn't want to see random notes like these in their timeline?





And my personal favorite:

Gestures like this can seem too simple and gimmicky to be truly meaningful. Can one Twitter account really change an entire culture of nastiness and cyberbullying? Um, no. But it's a step in the right direction.

On some days — you know those days — getting one nice comment, even from an automated bot, could definitely brighten your mood. Especially now.

In a time where many of our feeds are filled with heaviness, fear, and discord, moments of random positivity seem like a pretty good idea.

Not just for the momentary pleasure it brings, but because of the larger reminder it provides:

Even though the online world sometimes seems like a bizarre, surreal, and quite unreal place, it has the potential to replicate the best — and the worst — of our real-world tendencies, habits, and natures.

Sure, we can choose to replicate dangerous patterns of abuse, racism, sexism, hatred, gossip, insensitivity, exclusivity, and the like. But with every tweet, we also have the opportunity to spread more kindness, sensitivity, compassion — and maybe a little humor too.

So why not follow @TheNiceBot's lead and just do it? If more of us were nice bots (but, you know, human nice bots), the real world might just be a much nicer place.

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