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Divya (name changed), a young, 24-year-old content creator on Instagram, aspires to be a dancer and an actor. She is building her audience on Instagram by regularly posting her dance videos and acting gigs. On some days, she feels she can conquer the world, while on others, she wants to become invisible.
Nine hundred posts to date, but every post feels like it is the first time, with the same anxiety, dodging judgmental gazes in public places, unfamiliar eyeballs following her everywhere she goes.
While she is proud of the brand she is building for herself, on some days she wonders, at what cost?
The Cost of Visibility
Social media platforms, especially Instagram, have emerged as aspirational sites that are characterised by new opportunities.
It expands creative freedom and transforms skills into livelihood, beyond the constraints of a conventional workspace. But once we let go of our rose-tinted glasses, this illusion of expanded opportunities breaks.
This online presence and recognition come at a cost, and the same platform that rewards women for free expression punishes them for autonomy.
Trolling escalates into threats, moral policing is masked as unsolicited concern, and private messages turn invasive.
Women creators have to negotiate and make patriarchal bargains. For many creators, this negotiation begins much earlier than online trolling. It also plays out within families and intimate circles.
Tanshul (@tanshull), a digital creator with a closely connected community, recalls being exposed to uncomfortable attention at a young age without any guidance on digital safety.
“Visibility invites scrutiny,” Tanshul says. For her, continuing to post became a quiet act of resistance. “In the process, it healed a part of me,” she shares.
She adds, “I plan my content the way people plan risk, factoring in every foreseeable and unforeseeable threat to my safety, mental health, and privacy.”
Other ways to negotiate these challenges are by disabling comments, using less assertive captions, avoiding specific clothing and dance forms, and maintaining two accounts: a private one and a public one.
For some creators, the shift becomes even more substantial: from an expressive personal space to a more neutral one, since neutral feels safer.
This continuous self-monitoring encompasses emotional and cognitive labour; however, it is rarely acknowledged as such.
Angel Tyagi (@angelindubai), a Dubai-based lifestyle creator with over 234K+ followers, challenges the idea that women benefit from visibility.
“People think being a woman online gives you an advantage,” she says. Visibility is often mistaken for privilege, while the costs of sustaining it remain invisible.
The act of ensuring a safe and conducive space, which is essentially the role of social institutions and government at large, is made into a personal endeavour.
In such a scenario, safety becomes something that women must actively produce for themselves.
Aspiration in Gendered Digital Worlds
Online space, which is touted as a liberatory, non-judgmental space, one that is mushrooming with opportunities, comes with its own biases and structural constraints.
For women creators, gendered violence in digital spaces steadily shrinks that space, and thus the capacity to aspire becomes unevenly distributed.
While a woman creator may harbour aspirations, her social capacity to do so is shaped by what really feels possible, navigable, and permissible.
Kavya (@kk.create), a prominent storyteller on Instagram and YouTube with over 3.5 million followers, describes how normalised abuse shapes everyday life online.
“Ek galti ho jaaye toh log itni gaaliyan de denge” (“One small mistake, and people will hurl abuses”), Kavya says. “Aur phir sunne ko milta hai ki internet par aaye ho toh yeh sab toh sunna hi padega.” ("Then I’m told ‘you chose to be on the internet, so you have to listen to all this.”)
Sharing her experience of a particular week, Kavya described how the fear became overwhelming. “Every notification gave me anxiety. Every post made me wonder what fresh hell awaited in the comments,” she shares.
The fear was not just online; it followed her offline, too. “Darr laga” (“I was scared”), she admits, “lekin haar nahi maani” (“but I didn’t give up”).
Her experience captures how the anticipation of fear alone makes aspiration feel like a gamble. What once felt like a pathway to independence and reclamation of one’s identity becomes lined with warning signs.
Digital Violence as Structural Violence
Digital violence is structural, feeding on the underlying patriarchal structures.
It forces women to trade online presence and recognition for safety, and this leaves women consistently adapting their dreams to avoid harm, which is violence in itself.
Sameeksha (@sameekshamittal), a dance coach and creator with a loyal follower base, reflects on how platforms reshape creativity itself.
“Artists were never meant to create consistently,” she says. “We were eccentric, erratic, and wild.” Yet algorithms demand regular output, forcing creators to become machines to stay visible.
This pressure, she argues, is deeply tied to capitalism. The fight is no longer just for expression but for survival within a system that rewards conformity. Violence here is not about physical threat but rather about curtailed freedom.
Despite dwindling hope to aspire without fetters, women continue to reclaim space: both physical and online. They want the spaces to embrace collective accountability and build a digital culture where everyone is enabled to aspire and achieve.
Walking the tightrope of expression and exposure, women in digital spaces remind us that denial of digital freedom is not a minor inconvenience but a form of violence, one that quietly determines who can aspire and who cannot.
Aarushee Shukla is a Laadli Media Fellow. The opinions and views expressed are those of the author. SheThePeople, Laadli, and UNFPA do not necessarily endorse the views.