When people see a mean tweet, they just have to reply to it with “@GoodnessBot,” and the bot immediately goes to work. The bot has a vast database of both negative/mean words and positive/complimentary ones. When activated, it searches through the tweet for mean words, then swaps them out for positive antonyms, thus inverting the meaning of the original tweet. A tweet like “Fuck you, stupid bitch!” thus becomes “Bless you, savvy mermaid!”

To design the algorithm for the @GoodnessBot, developers analyzed 62 million bullying tweets, and created a list of 2,375 mean words that occur most often. With this algorithm, they identified all the different ways mean words are spelled on Twitter (bitch, b1tch, bi+ch, biatch, bish, etc.) as well as the nuances of context (“you’re a bitch” is harmful but “yasss bitch” is quite the opposite). They then created a database of affirming /complimentary words, creating a positive antonym for every mean word on the list. 

To launch the bot, Monica appeared on The Today Show and encouraged people to call on the @GoodnessBot to intervene in bullying situations on Twitter. People immediately started tagging @GoodnessBot to call out bullying. When others saw the bot in action in their newsfeed, they understood the tool and began to tag the bot in their own social conversations. With no media budget, the bot notched 241+ million impressions and attracted followers in 54 countries. It also changed online behavior; in the week after launch people who interacted with the bot increased their use of positive language by 18%.