4 ms·

According to this article, Near/Byuu's boss confirmed their death https://archive.ph/5xAEv https://archive.ph/5xAEv

• convery 4y ago
  Which, again, is one persons word vs. the JP and US governments. Not that the governments never lie, but I somehow doubt there's an international conspiracy to shield KF from criticism.
  • platz 4y ago
    I haven't gone down the rabbit hole on each specific claim on this—it seems complicated enough that if I'm being Bayesian about it, I'm assigning a non-zero probability to each of the possibilities.
    • boastful_inaba 4y ago
      The basic data point for claims for near/byuu faking it are: * He's done a disappearing act with an identity before! That's the reason for the near/byuu name split. People eventually figured out the two names were the same though. * He never appeared on the international US citizens death list that is regularly published. * There's been no independent confirmation of his death otherwise * The thread documenting him was long-inactive at the time he messaged the admin, so there wasn't anything that could have been called 'harassment' at the time. That doesn't mean the death is impossible. The US government bureaucracy could have failed, and the vanishing by suicide of a guy who had kept his name/face secret for quite some time is not hard to imagine either. Maybe the guy who told the dramatic story of byuu's last phone call on Twitter was telling the truth! Judge based on evidence, such as it is. KF has enormous threads full of archived backing for everyone's statements, if you really want to kill an evening reading the back story.