The Trayvon Martin Tweets

Read Slate’s complete coverage of the Trayvon Martin case. The Daily Caller has published a long, downloaded archive of the late Trayvon Martin’s tweets. The story, such as it is, is in the name: NO_LIMIT_NIGGA. (Do 17 year olds still listen to No Limit records?) That and his racier brain droppings have inspired a mini-surge of tsk-tsking on Twitter. ImaginePrints: “Nice young man, huh? He clearly was headed for trouble #RNCLatinos #RS” MattDycus: “It’s not right that he’s dead, but he wasn’t as innocent has you’ve heard.” Brian_Bokeni: “Does @BarrackObama think that if he had a son, his twitter page would be so gangsta?” This is, in some ways, a social media story; social media is absorbing the Twitter stream in a really predictable manner. At some point, the NO_LIMIT_NIGGA account was reportedly locked. It’s not locked right now, so here’s a screenshot of the front page. The photo of Martin had been made public days ago, and the Caller seems to have reverse-engineered its way to the account by noticing what Martin’s friends were tweeting, and who they were tweeting at.
The content: Really, really banal. After 20 minutes of scanning, I found a lot of disturbingly poor English (this is how kids write text messages, right?) and some occasional horndog bragging. It makes you wonder: What sort of tweets would have revealed that Martin wasn’t really innocent? Possibly something along the lines of “I see a white Hispanic guy following me; time to beat him up.” And… no, that’s really it. Martin had no history of violence. The most damaging thing we’ve learned about him is that he was suspended from school because he had an “empty marijuana baggie.”