He who lives by the cutting-edge dies by the cutting edge, as poor Thomas Tudehope has discovered.

The 26-year-old Tudehope was, until Saturday, chief online strategist for Malcolm Turnbull. Indications are he knew his shit.

In March 2008, the Public Relations Institute of Australia hosted a webinar (web-based seminar) titled “How to Prepare for Social Media before you flick the switch”. The session was presented by Thomas Tudehope.

According to the PRIA, at the 2007 election Malcolm Turnbull was “the only sitting member of a major political party to allow negative comment to be published on their blog”. Tudehope, it is safe to assume, was responsible for that policy. Just as he was responsible for Turnbull’s Twitter presence. In fact, it has recently emerged, he sent many of Malcolm’s tweets on his behalf.

But on Saturday, Tudehope was forced to flick the switch on his tenure in Turnbull’s office. Appropriately enough, it was social media that did for him.

A chain of emails appeared to implicate Tudehope in the crafting of a barbed YouTube video directed at 32-year-old Alex Hawke, Liberal member for the federal seat of Mitchell, and a man reviled by many in the party for his far-right Christian views (the Hillsong evangelical church is in Hawke’s electorate).

The weapon of choice was a variant on a YouTube staple, in which parodic English-language subtitles are added to a four-minute sequence from the 2004 movie Downfall, about the last days of Hitler. Tudehope has denied his involvement, but you can bet he has at the very least watched a few of these spoofs in his time. That’s precisely the sort of knowledge he was paid for.

The Downfall parody is a well-established meme on YouTube. Type in the phrase “downfall parodies” and you’ll get more than 1000 responses. Many of them are sport-related – there’s a great one on Brendan Fevola’s downfall after the Brownlows, and another on Cristiano Ronaldo leaving Manchester United for Real Madrid (Hitler is Alex Ferguson in that one). There’s also a very funny skit on Microsoft clamping down on modified X-Boxes, and a post-modern piece in which Hitler is told that the world is tiring of all the Downfall parodies. Some are barely literate, many of them are obscene, and almost all play to an audience already in on the joke.

So, too, does the Alex Hawke video. which is practically unintelligible to anyone not mired in the murky politics of the young Liberals and the NSW party proper. To the rest of us, the subtitles might as well be in German too.

But that's as it should be. Social media is all about building connections to and within communities of interest. Each network has its own codes and language and points of reference, and usually this makes them close to impenetrable to outsiders. That’s precisely their appeal and it’s precisely why politicians (and others) might feel the need for some young-gun expertise in cutting through to them.

But politicians (and others) can’t expect that when they go to play in this new space – this wild, lawless and slightly vexing frontier – that it will suddenly submit to their regular rules and expectations. Social media is not nice. It’s rough and ready and rapidly evolving.

As Tudehope might have said in his webinar last March, enter at your  peril.