George Zimmerman Video Outrage: Where Are Injuries From Travyon Fight? - The Daily Beast: Of course, that Zimmerman likely outweighed Martin by 50 pounds or more, or that the worst “criminal activity” alluded to in the Twitter account was smoking pot, or that a black teenager has a different relationship to the n-word than a middle-aged white pundit, or that Martin was not suspended for theft but for possessing trace amounts of marijuana didn’t matter. No. What mattered was that this version of events was so much more palatable and digestible than the notion that race had played a part in the death of an unarmed black teen (which is so...liberal). And that’s why the story festered and spread like a virus.
But that’s the problem with the hyperconnected age: the Internet may not make us more prone to spreading or believing rumors, but it compounds the power of these tendencies exponentially.