Wilson Gavin died this week. Related or not, Twitter is an awful place.

Twitter did not kill Wilson Gavin. But it’s a hellscape nonetheless.

On Sunday, 21-year-old Gavin led a protest at a drag queen storytime event in a Brisbane library. Along with a group from the University of Queensland’s Liberal National Club, Gavin loudly chanted, “Drag queens are not for kids,” in the face of one of the performers.

A video featuring Gavin as well as other members of the group surfaced on social media on Sunday evening. By Monday morning, Gavin was dead.

We do not know what took place in the private life of that young man on Sunday night. But we do have a sense of what took place in public.

On Twitter, where the video quickly became the top trending topic in the country, the protesters were widely referred to as “the Hitler youth”, a “skid mark on society”, “assholes”, “dickheads”, “twisted”, “sick” and “ugly”.

Listen to this week’s Mamamia Out Loud, where we discuss the complex story of Wilson Gavin. Post continues below. 

One tweet read, “every one of them looks like they have a chromosome missing,” which was rewarded with a few dozen likes, mostly from people who claimed they were outraged by the protesters lack of love and acceptance.

All Twitter did was flip the script, starting a new chant: “Young Liberals are not for kids”. Critics just managed to reproduce the same intolerance and divisiveness they claimed to be rallying against.

“Young Liberals are among the worst people I’ve met in my life,” one man posted. Later, of course, it would emerge that Gavin was not a Young Liberal at all. But Twitter never lets the truth get in the way of a biting insult.

While it would be reductive and irresponsible to suggest that Gavin died as a result of Twitter – his life extended far beyond what he did on Sunday, and he was much more than other people’s criticism of him – it’s worth acknowledging that the insults plastered all over the platform on Sunday night might have been some of the last things he ever read.

We don’t have to ask the authors of those particular tweets how they feel about that possibility. Their actions appear to tell us.

What hasn’t been widely reported is how many high-profile as well as ordinary people rushed to delete their tweets first thing Monday morning. They desperately tried to rewrite the story, ensuring they weren’t implicated in what would inevitably become a discussion about the danger of an online pile-on. It would appear they were so ashamed by what they had said given the turn of events, that they felt compelled to retract their insults.

Twitter as a platform isn’t about being virtuous. It’s about performing virtue. And on Sunday, virtue looked like competing over who could spit the very worst insult at Wilson Gavin.

On Monday, virtue looked like mourning his death.

What has been different about this case, which has made it invariably more complicated, is that the people who called Gavin a twisted Nazi are actually the same people who expressed their deepest sympathies not 12 hours later. Most did this without any acknowledgement of how quickly they had pivoted.

The community who were falling over themselves trying to adopt Gavin as their own, writing about how they wished he’d found them and experienced acceptance, are the ones who were calling him an entitled dickhead the day before.

This doesn’t say anything about Gavin the person, who ultimately none of us knew. It does, however, say a great deal about the hypocrisy of Twitter.

The medium is the message, and Twitter is a medium that forces us to condense the complexity and nuance of the world around us into 280 characters. The most common length of a Tweet is 33 characters. Just long enough to shout into a megaphone: “Scott Morrison is a f*cking moron”. (Count it. It’s exactly 33 characters).

It is not a place where meaningful or productive conversations take place. Instead, everything is simplified, including people, into categories of either good or bad.

Negativity and a common enemy is what goes viral. Everyone is shouting over the top of each other and yet no one is saying anything of value.

While swarms of people seem desperate to put words into Gavin’s mouth, it might be useful to look closely at the words he actually did say.

“As a conservative you are subjected to an unending barrage of vitriol and hatred… you get attacked online. You get people making comments about your mental health which is something I never expected to hear from these people that preach tolerance. I’ve had people say that I only believe the things I do because I come from a broken family, that I have internalised homophobia, that I hate myself…”