I think the media's contrarian bias has a lot to do with it. Nobody wants to share the 10th version of the same story about SBF being a fraud on their social media. However, if you write a contrarian "Maybe SBF was a good guy" article then it's going to spread like wildfire across social media.

The same thing happened after Elizabeth Holmes' fraud was revealed. There were a lot of articles claiming that she was actually the victim, or that the industry was to blame, or that everyone was doing the same thing with their startups. None of those aged well, but they drove clicks at the time.