Смерть модели Твиши Шармы превратилась в цифровой спектакль: как соцсети превращают трагедию в контент

‘Societies choose their dead.’ This phrase is often invoked to think about the social construction of death and how systemic violence is remembered. It acquires a different meaning in the age of social media. The death of Twisha Sharma became one such moment in India recently. Twisha Sharma, a former model and actor, was found dead at her marital home in Bhopal, Madh ya Pradesh, India in May 2026. While initial reports described the death as a case of hanging, her family alleged dowry-related harassment and raised questions about the suspicious circumstances surrounding her death. Her husband Samarth Singh and her mother-in-law Giribala Singh were arrested on charges of dowry-related harassment, mental abuse and domestic violence. The case quickly attracted  national attention, leading to protests by women’s groups,  court proceedings, and a demand for a second autopsy. The second  autopsy’s results ruled out the charges of a murder. The case however, remains under legal scrutiny and the facts continue to be examined by the investigative agencies. This article analyses the visual and narrative forms through which the Twisha Sharma case circulated on Instagram.  In the weeks that followed the death of Twisha Sharma, our Instagram feeds were saturated with  reels, commentary videos, footage of her wedding celebrations with Bollywood songs, clips of the  CCTV footage of her last moments, AI-generated pictures, dramatic voiceovers, tribute edits with  Bollywood songs and calls for justice. Twisha Sharma’s story circulated rapidly through short-form  content on Instagram that invited users to mourn, react, share and participate in collective outrage.  As the case moved across digital platforms, the conditions of gendered violence that produced it  were often displaced by emotionally charged narratives, aestheticised visuals and algorithmically  generated forms of engagement. The digital presence of this case thus raises a broader question  about the representation of violence against women in contemporary digital spaces: what happens  when experiences of gendered violence become “content”? Digital articulation, however, does not always remain limited to screen. In contemporary movements against gendered violence, online visibility has at times translated into street politics, collective mobilisation and sustained political action. #NiUnaMenos movement in Argentina, Women, Life and Freedom movement in Iran and the Metoo movement in different parts of the world have transformed experiences of gender-based violence into larger collective action with the help of digital space. Recently, the CJP protests in India also demonstrated how digital presence can lead to collective political action and street politics. While some cases move from the screen to the street, others remain within the attention economy of social media, where violence and grief are repeatedly reproduced, consumed and eventually displaced. The Twisha Sharma case offers an example of the latter. The visibility and digital presence of cases of gender-based violence is not, in itself, a limitation. Digital platforms have enabled conversations that traditional media often ignored or marginalised. However, visibility is not a neutral category and digital platforms are not outside the relations of power. Which cases of gender-based violence are highlighted on social media and which are not? Are the ones that are highlighted used to question and challenge the systemic tools of gender-based dominance or are they reduced to isolated interpersonal issues? As Catherine A. MacKinnon has long argued, gendered violence cannot be understood as a series of isolated incidents; it is embedded in structures of male dominance. When each case is presented as an individual tragedy designed for circulation, the structural relations that produce such violence risk disappearing from view. What happens when experiences of gendered violence become content?  A striking feature of the online response to the Twisha Sharma case was the transformation of  private suffering into a reproducible media format. One repeatedly encountered reels built around  wedding videos and smiling images from celebrations accompanied by melancholic Bollywood  songs and captions foreshadowing tragedy. The instagram reels also used CCTV footage of her last moments, replayed and enlarged through slow-motion edits, zoom-ins and dramatic narration. Screenshots of her personal conversations were converted into visual evidence, while Instagram influencers addressed the camera directly, offering explanations, reactions and moral commentary. Several content-creators recreated or parodied statements often using exaggerated expressions, comic timing, lip-syncing and dramatic voice modulation. The juxtaposition of her pre-wedding photographs with images of her dead body accompanied by Bollywood songs, the circulation of her private text messages, enactments of  dowry deaths as humour, funeral videos, and commentary over her parents’ mourning were rationalised as means to communicate a viewpoint for seeking justice. Such videos introduced an element of entertainment and even comic relief into a case involving  allegations of dowry-related violence and a young woman’s death. While many of these creators may have intended to criticise or ridicule the individuals involved, the format itself shifted attention away from the gravity of the issue. The reels demanded engagement, humour and relatability, transforming a matter of public concern into a performative spectacle. In the process, the boundaries  between political commentary, entertainment and consumption are increasingly blurred. This is what we mean by the ‘contentification’ of gendered violence. A woman’s life, death and  suffering are transformed into material generated for circulation, engagement and repetition. Every view, share and comment strengthens visibility. However, the visibility on a platform economy is never entirely altruistic. Instagram rewards engagement, and engagement itself becomes a commodity. This process begins with the transformation of lived experience into spectacle, where it is reproduced repeatedly for circulation and eventually commodified by the very process it seeks to counter. By choosing a case of gender-based violence, the spectacle creates a sense of collective trauma for digital consumption, only for the spectator to forget it the moment they scroll to the next reel. As Guy Debord observes in The Society of the Spectacle, the spectacle becomes “a worldview that has actually been materialized, that has become an objective reality”. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag questions what happens when human suffering is  encountered primarily through visuals. Images can shock, provoke sympathy and draw attention to  injustice. Images of violence can also provide a sense of relief to the spectator who feels that their  social reality is distant from the one being portrayed in the images. This transforms suffering into an  object of consumption. The viewer becomes a spectator of pain rather than a participant in political  action and structural change. Repeated exposure does not necessarily deepen understanding; it can  produce familiarity, emotional fatigue, or what Sontag describes as a form of passive witnessing.  Much of the content surrounding cases of gendered violence in social media platforms invites viewers to experience shock, grief and outrage, but rarely encourages sustained engagement with the structural realities of dowry related violence, domestic abuse, marriage, family or failure of institutional accountability. The spectator encounters the tragedy of an individual woman rather than the broader social  conditions that make such tragedies possible. This is where the ‘contentification’ of violence  becomes visible. The structure of these videos transforms Twisha Sharma into a tragic narrative arc rather than a subject embedded within a wider arena of gender-based violence and patriarchy. What emerges is not political understanding but a form of voyeuristic curiosity sustained through repetition. Twisha Sharma’s photographs, messages, voice and  personal moments continue to circulate, giving the impression that the public is remaining engaged. However, what is often being consumed is not an analysis of gendered violence but a spectacle of grief. The question is not whether we should look, but whether our ways of looking allow us to understand the structures of power that produced the violence. What is significant is whether digital circulation produces collective political action or merely reproduces the spectacle of gender-based violence by making it an individual tragedy and not looking critically at the patriarchal institutions of marriage, family, religion, caste and state that produce such cases in the first place. The CJP protests demonstrate how digital visibility can lead to street politics, while the circulation of Twisha Sharma’s death remained largely, within the ambits of content, where her pictures, personal text messages, and suffering continued to be reproduced and consumed. It is pertinent to make this distinction. Visibility can be necessary for justice but visibility alone does not constitute political action. In Susan Sontag’s terms, the viewer is encouraged to look, feel, react and move on. The structural questions around gender and violence remain largely untouched. A Sontagian critique, therefore, is not a critique of digital visibility itself. It is a critique of the forms through which visibility is produced. Get the latest CounterCurrents updates delivered straight to your inbox. Dr. Anukriti Gupta is an Assistant Professor at the School of Gender Studies at Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala. She holds an M.Phil. in Gender Studies and a Ph.D. in Women’s Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.  Prakriti Prabhat Sharan is Senior Research Associate at Muslim Women’s Forum, New Delhi. She holds an M.Phil. in Gender Studies from School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, University of London.)