Twelve women’s bodies. The chart still files it under replies.

Gender-based violence is not always the tag at the top, which is how a chart lies without saying anything false. On many days the word that trends is a police name, a nationality fight, or a farm murder. Open the replies and the dead women are what people are actually arguing with.

The count, checked against the reporting rather than the replies, is this. By 28 September police had confirmed 12 women’s bodies found east of Johannesburg over two months, with the alarm sharpest around Kempton Park and Ekurhuleni. Arrests had been made in some of the cases. Police said those arrests did not all appear to be the same crime, and they had not ruled out a serial killer. Earlier in September, reporters mapping Kempton Park alone had five bodies between 15 July and 14 September. The number moved because more women were found, not because the internet invented them. This article will not describe what was done to them. Their names are already in the news. They do not need to be used again as colour.

What it does where they lived.

For a woman in Kempton Park this is not a reply. It is what time she leaves, which road she takes, whether a run is still a run, and whether a daughter is allowed to walk to the taxi. That change does not need a hashtag to be real, which is why the chart can miss it. The rest of the country then borrows the bodies. When a post about another crime goes up, someone answers with Kempton Park. When a post about a farm murder goes up, the same answer arrives as a counter. Not because the deaths are one story. Because each side is accusing the other of only counting its own dead.

That habit has a cost, and South Africans are paying it in the worst room in the app. A reply thread is a bad place to do justice, and it is the place the timeline has chosen. Women become evidence in someone else’s argument about whose pain is being ignored. On 8 October the top of the chart is a fight between South African and Kenyan users. Under it sit Home Affairs, the election, petrol, SASSA and Sibiya. Gender-based violence may not be the label on the tab. It is still what arrives the moment crime is mentioned. If you only rank hashtags, you will report that the country moved on. If you live in the east of Johannesburg, you have not. A reply can force the subject back onto a screen. It cannot be the case docket, and it cannot be the walk home.