#IllRideWithYou trends worldwide after Sydney hostage standoff

The campaign started after Brisbane resident Rachael Jacobs posted on Facebook that she had seen a fearful Muslim woman on the train remove her hijab.

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"Like most people, she had been looking at her phone, then slowly started to unpin her scarf," Jacobs wrote in a piece for the Brisbane Times. "Tears sprang to my eyes, and I was struck by feelings of anger, sadness and bitterness. It was in this mind-set that I punched the first status update into my phone, hoping my friends would take a moment to think about the victims of the siege who were not in the cafe."

That status prompted Twitter user @SirTessa to start the hashtag #IllRideWithYou, which quickly started to trend locally on Twitter. It has now gone global.