Bullied Teenager Callum Manning Becomes Instagram-Famous After His Sister’s Tweet About Bullying

A British teenager who was bullied for starting an Instagram account to review books has found himself with something every social media user craves — hundreds of thousands of followers — CNN reports. Callum Manning can thank his sister and her tweet about the perils of bullying for his sudden Instagram fame.

Callum, 13, loves books. A few months ago he had the idea to use Instagram for something other than photos of food, outfits, or travels, like so many users of the social media platform do. Instead, he decided to use it to show photos of books and provide a review.

His first post, on February 23, was a review of Stephen King’s 1977 novel The Shining.

“This book was the first book I read in 1 day,” he wrote.

Other book reviews followed: Caroline Kepnes’ You, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Stephen King’s It, and so on.

Unfortunately, it seems that some of Callum’s classmates don’t find using Instagram to review books “cool,” and other kids took to bullying him.

On Friday, Callum’s 24-year-old big sister, Ellis Landreth, tweeted that her brother was being bullied over his book review account.

“Kids in his new school have seen it and have created a group chat calling him a creep slagging him off about it and added him to it so he could see,” she wrote.

Landreth says that she wrote the tweet expecting that a handful of her followers might post messages of support. What she did not expect was that her tweet would go insanely viral, racking up tens of thousands of comments, likes, and retweets.

Things snowballed from there. Within hours of his sister’s tweet, Callum had racked up tens of thousands of followers on Instagram.

“Hey let’s all follow Cals Book Account on Instagram and show him some support,” wrote English novelist Matt Haig, who also promised to send Callum some books.

Authors Caroline Kepnes and Malorie Blackman also shared Callum’s story on social media.

When all was said and done, Callum’s account had racked up 254,000 followers, as of this writing.

Callum, for his part, returned to school on Monday something of a hero, with 15,000 direct messages to sort through on his Instagram account.

“I’m sure they’re all super jealous,” Landreth said of her brother’s former tormentors.

In February, as reported at the time by The Inquisitr, a bullied Australian boy received an outpouring of support after his mother posted a heartbreaking video of the lad crying and saying he wished someone would kill him. A GoFundMe account set up for the boy to take a trip to Disneyland raised tens of thousands of dollars.