Maybe, maybe not. I'm not sure what I can or can't say here, but will try to be vague. I personally saw two people making comments on public Facebook posts. One of them was the mother in law of a certain young lady who is the daughter of a POI. The MIL was saying she knew the family and was sure the kids were safe. Some people suggested that if she really had the information she claimed to have that she might be doing good for all concerned to talk to LE. Then her daughter-in-law (the certain young lady above) commented that she (the MIL) didn't know what whe was talking about. As I remember it the MIL went back and deleted all of her comments not long after her daughter-in-law objected, but the CYL commented several times on multiple posts after that, but at some point went back and deleted most (maybe all) comments on the particular page(s) I saw her commenting on.
So if I understand your question it is whether the defense from people like this and others stopped because they came to the conclusion that maybe they weren't as innocent as first thought. My inclination is that the two examples I gave above decided to back off and stop defending because they figured out that they weren't ultimately helping things by making claims they couldn't back up. At least in a venue as public as they were and a situation where who they are is so obvious. We still had the situation where the CYL was sticking her tongue out while the local news was taking the video during the search of CD's home, so I'm not inclined to think her thoughts have changed and she's seeing her dad as guilty, but that she was showing a bit more retraint because she wasn't helping. (Obviously the tongue incident demonstrates she still slips up at times.)
We had it least one or two people who had never posted on WS before dropping in here, it appeared specifically to defend CD, but then disappeared fairly quickly. So people are still defending in some instances where they can maintain annonymity, but we also have others who are being what I'd call realistic (as in they don't think things look good and lean toward CD not being what he appeared, but don't claim to have the answers or be sure of what is going on). MOOOOO