So you reckon that when Justine quipped that white people were unable to get AIDS people getting annoyed at her, well-that was dead unfair?
Social media distorts normal human interactions into something unrecognizable. It gives the "opportunity" for millions of people to become sincerely,
personally offended by the words or attitude of a complete stranger, while at the same time hampering their ability to conceptualize this stranger as an actual person.
Every person who participated in the Twitter outrage was,
from their point of view, doing the equivalent of throwing a rock in the direction of some pest rummaging through their garbage bin.
On the other side of the aisle, the offender has essentially no choice but to experience it as a public stoning.
What about the type that drives people to suicide?
People who are trying to "win" a debate or discussion have little reason to back down from their own fallacious arguments if they can help it, so it's not exactly uncommon for them to serve additional helpings of whataboutism to their audience even after having been explicitly called out on it.
Literally starting them with the phrase "what about", however... *that* takes a special kind of person.
As for the argument itself, I'll say that the motives behind someone's suicide are rarely as simple and straightforward as they are made out to be, and that using those deaths for the sake of making a political point is...
ethically questionable.
Kind of off-topic, but... what horrifies me the most about those two cases is how
small-scale they actually were. A few thousand reactions is next to nothing on the scale of the Internet, and whatever media impact the original incidents may have had has been completely eclipsed by the resulting tragedies. This really helps put into perspective the multi-million-strong "memeization" campaigns that have long been taken for granted as part of "Internet culture".