Digital witches of social media: Feminist critique of spiritual advisor accounts on Instagram

Social media has become not merely a space of visibility for women, but a social arena in which women's knowledge, bodies, and emotions—historically subjected to control—are once again opened to debate. In this context, spiritual consultancy practices that have gained visibility on Instagram provide a new digital space of expression for women's knowledge grounded in healing, intuition, and emotional labor, which was previously suppressed through discourses of witchcraft. While spiritual consultancy offers women opportunities for empowerment and solidarity, it simultaneously emerges as a fragile field in which historical practices of witch-hunting are reproduced in digital forms. This study aims to examine spiritual consultancy accounts on Instagram from a feminist perspective and to reveal how these practices are shaped within gender relations through the digital reflections of patriarchal structures. The research adopts a qualitative methodology and is based on semi-structured, in-depth interviews conducted with eight women who offer spiritual counseling services via Instagram. The data were thematically analyzed in accordance with critical feminist discourse analysis. The findings indicate that women tend to turn to spiritual counseling primarily during moments of personal rupture, relational difficulties, emotional burdens, and in their search for healing. While spiritual counseling practices provide spaces of emotional support, meaning-making, and women's solidarity, they also entail significant risks, including the ambiguity of expertise boundaries, manipulative discourses, ethical concerns, and exposure to digital violence. The study demonstrates that patriarchal structures in the digital sphere are reproduced through practices of sexualized visibility, emotional labor, and delegitimization, coalescing around the figure of the "digital witch." While spiritual counseling offers women possibilities for empowerment, it simultaneously involves vulnerabilities such as surveillance, control, and exposure to attack. In this respect, the study contributes to the literature on women's experiences in the digital age and contemporary practices of witch-hunting by addressing the relationship between social media, gender, and spiritual counseling within a feminist framework. Keywords: Spiritual Counseling, Feminist Critique, Witch, Social Media, Patriarchy.