When Social Media Evidence Becomes a Weapon Against a Teen

Netflix’s new documentary The Crash has landed at number one, and it’s sparking a conversation that goes far beyond the tragic facts of the case. The film tells the story of Mackenzie Shirilla, a Strongsville, Ohio high school student who drove a Toyota Camry into the side of a building at almost 100 mph in 2022, killing her 20-year-old boyfriend, Dominic Russo, and her boyfriend’s friend, 19-year-old Davion Flanagan. Shirilla was convicted of murder, felonious assault, aggravated vehicular homicide, drug possession, and possession of criminal tools in 2023, and was given life in prison with eligibility for parole after 15 years. She continues to claim she blacked out before the crash.

But here’s what’s making this documentary required viewing for anyone who cares about how we judge teens in the age of social media: the prosecution’s strategy wasn’t to focus solely on the facts of the crash itself. Instead, directors Gareth Johnson and Angharad Scott present a deeply uncomfortable portrait of how Shirilla’s own Instagram and TikTok posts were weaponized against her in court. The prosecution showed a video of Shirilla in a Halloween costume—a Corpse Bride look, waist cinched impossibly small by a corset—posted just three months after the crash. The goal was clear: paint her as remorseless, as someone so detached from the gravity of killing two people that she could party and pose mere weeks later. It worked. One Rotten Tomatoes reviewer summed up the prevailing sentiment:“No amount of protesting from her deluded parents or friends can erase how vile she comes across in her social media posts.”

This raises a thorny question that the documentary seems to wrestle with but never quite resolve: When we judge teens through the lens of their social media, are we seeing them clearly, or are we seeing a carefully curated (or carelessly authentic) performance that we’ve been trained to read as confession? Rosie Graham, Shirilla’s influencer friend with nearly a million TikTok followers, tried to explain that the Halloween costume was just a homage to Playboi Carti, and that people don’t understand the relentless pace of internet culture—the way you post dozens of times a day, the way context collapses, the way a video that seems tone-deaf in hindsight was just part of the endless scroll.“You cannot use that against her,”Graham argued. But The Crash demonstrates that people absolutely will use it against her. They already have.

The documentary also puts uncomfortable spotlights on Shirilla’s parents, who allowed their 13-year-old daughter to start a relationship with a 17-year-old, and later let her move in with that boyfriend while she was still in high school. Shirilla’s father, looking like Jon Stewart’s long-lost brother and wearing a T-shirt with the word“Boom!”in comic-book font, defensively said he didn’t have a problem with her smoking marijuana. After the documentary aired, he was put on administrative leave from his teaching job. His clarification to TMZ—that he“couldn’t lock her up in her room”—felt like an admission that the family had lost control of the situation years before the crash ever happened. Her mother said Mackenzie didn’t“need much discipline,”a statement that reads now as a parent clinging to a narrative about her daughter’s good character long after signs should have suggested this was a child in serious trouble.

What makes The Crash genuinely agonizing for parents watching it isn’t the crash itself—it’s the recognition that there were so many missed opportunities to intervene. A teenager with unrestricted social media access, drug use that her parents were aware of and tolerant about, a relationship that began when she was a young teenager with someone years older, and parents who seemed more like indulgent friends than authority figures. Meanwhile, Scott Flanagan, the father of one of the victims—Davion Flanagan—became something unexpected in the documentary’s reception: a minor folk hero. He said simply,“Nobody in their right mind would post about being thrilled about an opportunity after they’d just killed two people.”His clarity and grief provided a stark contrast to Shirilla’s parents’defensiveness, and even Cardi B chimed in on X to say,“Love him. He does not play!”

The real nightmare fuel here isn’t just the tragedy itself. It’s the way a teenage girl’s entire inner life—her vanity, her poor judgment, her attempts to seem cool or unbothered—has become permanent evidence in a murder case, broadcast to millions of Netflix subscribers. Whether that evidence paints an accurate picture of her character or simply a snapshot of the worst parts of being a self-absorbed teenager performing for an audience is a question The Crash leaves deliberately unanswered. And that ambiguity might be the most unsettling part of all.