A second social media related suicide in as many weeks hit the headlines today. Last month, Daniel Perry jumped off the Forth Road bridge, allegedly after being blackmailed on Skype; it has also been reported that he was receiving abuse and threats on ask.fm – a website for which it is becoming almost compulsory to attach the tag "controversial".

When newspapers reported the suicide of Hannah Smith as a result of bullying on ask.fm, David Cameron called for a boycott of "vile websites". Yet it is unlikely he will do the same with Skype. The circumstances are of course sadly similar: a young life is cut tragically short because a minority of users are abusing an online platform. My hunch is that familiarity breeds common sense: little more than the online evolution of a Victorian invention, Skype straddles new and old technology. Not like question-and-answer forums, or Twitter, which are dizzyingly fast and incomprehensible to the uninitiated.

There is a problem when politicians attempt to pronounce on the workings of the internet; too many of them don't or won't get it, probably through a mixture of generational and cultural disconnect. It is a foolish blind spot to cultivate, given that a tweet from the White House that combined a dog and Mean Girls got 23,426 retweets and universal approval just the other day – and how often does a politician manage that? Even the Ed Balls meme (if you're not on Twitter don't even try to understand this), initially laced with schadenfreude, has culminated with people who originally disliked Balls feeling almost affectionate towards him.

But when politicians get the internet wrong, the internet can be ruthless. Sarkozy posts a photo on Facebook claiming to have been at the fall of the Berlin Wall? Mary Macleod claims to have single-handedly ensured a victory for women on banknotes? No, the internet isn't having that – and so these politicians face the kind of swift justice only the internet can deliver: a ruthless lampooning via the medium of Photoshop. As Sarkozy was muscled into the moon landings, so Mary Macleod found herself celebrated as the architect of the Normandy landings, joining John Terry at the cup final and, in a particularly meta evolution of the mini-meme, taking credit for herself taking credit for banknotes.

Of course, there's nothing new about satire: it's as old as politics. But the internet is peculiarly adapted to deftly pricking pomposity. This is partly because nothing dies online, meaning your past indiscretions are never yesterday's news, wrapped round the proverbial fish and chips. They are always out there in the ether, just waiting for the moment you decide to claim you created the internet. (Not that that one was ever going to fly for Al Gore.)

Perhaps more significant however, is the internet's sheer speed. A piece of information can travel round the world in the time it takes to hit "post". When it comes to politicians trying to shape narratives to suit themselves, this speed is disruptive beyond Hogarth's wildest imaginings.

This disruptiveness must be scary for a political class used to having it their own way – as the Tories and Lib Dems, who discovered, at a cost of £520,000 this week, that the internet wasn't down with redefining "government" to mean "party". Given "literally" has this week been redefined to mean "figuratively", you can see why they fancied their chances. But with the internet, the inverted Big Brother, it was literally a non-starter – and within half a day of the story breaking, they were forced to give Joan Edwards's bequest to the Treasury.

This is not to suggest that politicians want to control the internet for cynical gain. But what these stories reveal is that too many of them still don't understand it. They don't understand its power, and they don't understand its limitations. No one would claim that the internet creates democracy, merely that it gives it a super-charged shot of adrenaline. So why think the internet creates misogyny, hatred or, indeed, the sort of toxic bullying we have read about this week? These are the hallmarks of humanity, and if we want to combat them, we need societal solutions. And the sooner politicians wake up to this fact, the sooner we can return to the original purpose of the internet: cat gifs and Sarkozy photoshopped on to the moon.