The disinformation hurricane surrounding the Bondi stabbing marks the end of Twitter as a breaking news destination | Van Badham

It’s a bizarre paradox that the same medium that delivered the direct, material and immediate news of the tragedy to the communities of those affected by it was also the place that platformed wild disinformation campaigns that exploited the murders for what I’d describe as “carnage opportunism”.

Before the final numbers of the dead were even known, online nobodies and the “influencers” who pander to them decided that the 40-year-old Queensland man simply must’ve been a Muslim terrorist by virtue … of having a beard.

They’ve since been taken down, but those posters hadn’t responded to thousands of furious corrections by the time an anti-vax conspiracy theorist – presently holed up in the Russian consulate in Sydney, avoiding arrest – was on X (formerly Twitter), encouraging a new rumour that the assailant was a Jewish Australian.

On the same platform, receiving far less attention was the father of a 20-year-old university student named Benjamin Cohen, that online commenters now suggested was the killer, begging for people to stop sending death threats to his son.

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X/Twitter suffered a mortal wound as a news-and-information medium when Elon Musk bought it, but died in front of every Australian when it allowed the foul scapegoating of innocent communities in the wake of horrendous brutality.