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Online bullies have launched a massive body-shaming campaign in response to a Reddit ban on "fat-hating" communities.

Bullies claimed their anti-obesity drive will be "bigger than The Fappening", when hackers leaked a huge cache of naked celeb pictures.

We found several new websites sharing details of how to join the campaign, as well as shocking new pages dedicated to tormenting overweight people - a sick practice often referred to as "chubby-baiting".

The "fat hate" crusade has been dubbed "The Fattening", with some supporters using an ominous logo of a many-headed "Hydra" to pledge allegiance.

The campaign comes in response to Reddit's decision to close down forums with titles like "Fat People Hate" in a bid to clamp down on harassment.

But the move appears to have backfired, because the anti-fat trolls have simply decamped elsewhere.

A website template is being openly shared online, so that people can start up their own vile abuse pages.

All tormentors need to do is upload two images and some code from the "Fat People Hate Stylesheet" to start their very own bullying site.

On the website 8Chan, a man claiming to be the administrator of Reddit's shuttered "Fat People Hate" thread, which had more 30,000 subscribers, is calling for volunteers to set up threads to "continue spreading fat hate as usual".

Writing under the name Evil Monkey, he said: "Reddit most likely will continue banning any reincarnation of FPH, so I believe now it's time to jump ship."

He posted an email address and said he was looking for two volunteers to help run the new community, which has just two rules:

1. NO fat people allowed

2. NO fat sympathy whatsoever

A new website called Slimgur has also been set up with the exclusive purpose of sharing images of overweight people.

Its name is a mocking take on Imgur, a famous photo-sharing website which apparently shares Reddit's attitude towards body-shaming.

The Slimgur front page shows a shocking image of a fat couple, the women naked and the man topless, clad only in a pair of hideous blue jeans and wielding a sword.

Within this website, we saw grim photos of plus-sized graves, mocking images of big-boned ladies in bikinis and shocking snaps of chubby children.

(Image: Getty)

Many former Reddit users have also flocked to a website called Voat, which appeared to crash at several points throughout the day. It is unclear whether this outage is due to demand.

There is also a anti-fat underground forming in several hidden chatrooms.

We found and joined one of these chat services, using the nickname 'Fatty Boom Boom' to blend in with the rest of the body-shamers.

'We want to engender self-loathing in fat people," one anonymous person told us.

"We should require computers to be powered by a bike or treadmill, which would either outright eliminate or greatly decrease the online presence [of overweight men and women]," another raged.

All of the people we spoke to on this board vowed to continue to torment overweight people - their cruel passions reignited by the Reddit ban.

Have you been upset by cruel bullies online? Email jasper.hamill@trinitymirror.com to share your story.