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Inspired by other acts of generosity that she'd read about on social media, Tessa Kum invited anyone wearing religious attire who was afraid for their safety to ride alongside her on public transport. In an emotional interview, she spoke with Ellen Fanning about the success of her hashtag, #illridewithyou.

What made you post the tweet?

It was very much a sort of breaking point for me. I sort of saw another tweet online indicating another woman’s act of kindness [Rachael Jacobs] and I simply felt that there needed to be more of that in the world.

She’d done a very simple thing—she had seen a distressed Muslim woman on a train take off her hijab and had approached that woman at the train station and simply said, 'Put it back on, I’ll walk with you'. That broke my heart a little bit.

If you reg take the #373 bus b/w Coogee/MartinPl, wear religious attire, & don’t feel safe alone: I’ll ride with you. @ me for schedule. — Sir Tessa (@sirtessa) December 15, 2014

Maybe start a hashtag? What’s in #illridewithyou? — Sir Tessa (@sirtessa) December 15, 2014

It just seemed that a simple way of promoting that kindness would be to say if anybody catching public transport didn’t feel comfortable just because of what they were wearing, I would sit next to them, so they weren’t alone.

If anything, for any horrible reason should happen, they’re not alone. I don’t think it’s anything that needs to be restricted to Muslims or religious garb—this could go for anybody who has a visible presence which automatically singles them out for attention.

When did you realise this was something that was going to touch hearts?

It was when my phone wouldn’t stop vibrating that I realised it was going well beyond me ... People have already been helped by this. It’s already happened.

Sydney is the biggest city in Australia. It cannot be summed up in anything that can be put in 140 characters. We are complicated and we are contradictory and conflicting and we just have to live with that. That means that we will get sad, angry men who do what he did. And we will also get very tired, frazzled people who will step up and speak out.

Follow ABC News for live coverage of the Sydney siege