Near commits suicide after cyberbullying

On June 27, Hector Martin Cantero (known for hacking several consoles, going under his username "marcan") released a Google Doc revealing that Near, creator of BSNES, Higan and Ares emulators, and their friends were continuously harassed by Kiwi Farms. According to Hector, most were doxxed, some directly harassing others, and even specifically seeking out suicidal people to target. This in turn broke Near and caused them to fall into a depression and end their own life. Hector ended the Google Doc blaming DreamHost (the Kiwi Farms domain registrar) and CloudFlare (the one that protects Kiwi Farms against attacks) for their death.

Response
Many expressed their remorse for Near and disgust over Kiwi Farms' behavior. As of now, its unknown when Kiwi Farms will receive a class action lawsuit from Near's family or not.

On June 29th, Operator of Kiwifarms, Null, came out with his own response in regards to the situation.

In it, he mentions how Near was an active user on the site having a 13 page thread on the forum in which he participated in. He also shows a message he left on the site as well which reads: "So sincerely, and only in my case and no one else's, thank you for the wake-up call here OP. No hard feelings. I'm not asking you to take it down, and I know you never would anyway. Keep it. Mirror it. Put it on a titanium disk and ship it into space. I'll own all of my mistakes. If you ever get a DMCA or GDPR request or some bullshit on this, it's not me. Send me an e-mail and I'll counter-claim it myself. People do impersonate me (eg on Stormfront), so keep your guard up against any false flagging or white knighting, please. I support free speech absolutely, even when it's speech I don't like, because silencing it only makes things worse. I even defended Tom in the recent Goemon translation controversy, knowing that'd lose me support among my friends. And I'll lose a lot of support by simply posting here at all. So be it".

He also mentioned how Kiwifarms is in fact not an "organized harassment site" designed to "drive people to suicide". Stating that their rule about "no trolling plans" and otherwise not messing with people is not for liability and how the principle of "look, don't touch" is built into the zeitgeist of the community. "The users on this website are ordinary people who want to watch the trash TV of the Internet. With limited exception (Zoosadism and Nick Bate), there is no desire to see people harmed".

He then goes on to state how there is no evidence to Near's death. "The only source of this suicide is the Twitter user marcan42, who himself is a secondary source citing a totally anonymous person. The Google Doc describes a preposterous scenario where a real life friend of Byuu was called late at night, and then he proceeded to sit on the phone for 30 minutes while his friend overdosed and killed himself. The document describes the music playing in the background, but nothing else. No discussion, no attempts to stop him, no attempts to call welfare services. This is an unrealistic story described in such a way which does not hold up to scrutiny. In the emails to me, Byuu claimed he had no real life friends. The document claims that this person had sushi with Byuu the week before.

Byuu himself is anonymous. In the years that the Kiwi Farms (famous for 'doxing') had a thread on Byuu, no one had a first or last name for him. Nobody knew where he lived. Nobody knew what he looked like. None of his personal information is in that thread. Even right now, we cannot do a wellness check to see if he's alive. Marcan's last tweet about Byuu came a day after his first. He says that he, with no relation to Byuu, called the police of Tokyo and that they confirmed, over the phone, that Byuu was dead. This is not how the police operate in any country, never mind Japan, where personal privacy is deeply revered in their society. Marcan's claim that the police would do this seriously undermines his credibility."

He then makes the statement that Near has a history of manipulative behavior as can be seen in an archived post Byuu made a post on his forum (which has since been deleted) accusing a rival emulator developer named Squarepusher from Retroarch of harassing him for a decade. Byuu also appears to have posted how he retired from emulation development in 2020, but this wasn't true since he would continue development months later.

The final point in his response points to how Byuu, at one point, tried to extort money from Null. "Byuu emailed me the day before posting his tweet chain. In it, he attempted to extort me. Byuu claimed that if I did not delete all information about him on the forum, he would kill himself and blame me. He offered me $120,000 cash. He also offered me his services helping write software for the Kiwi Farms. I saw this as a legally and morally dubious offer at best, entrapment at worst, so I declined. I told him I would have to consult an attorney. He barely waited 12 hours after his first email before closing communications and deciding to go through with his plan at 3am my time. In his emails to me, he promised a trusted friend would deliver a scan of his passport on Twitter within 5 hours of him killing himself as proof. Two days later, we still do not have this passport scan or any evidence he has killed himself besides the testimony of a Twitter user, citing an anonymous third party. It personally interests me that the Google Doc names two third-party services the Kiwi Farms does actually use (albeit, neither 'host' the forum). This information is not obvious without educated scrutiny, because a lot of the Kiwi Farms's infrastructure is self-hosted and owned directly by me - unlike most websites online. Marcan was both very fast and very accurate in finding and naming these two unaffiliated companies. I don't believe that he could have found that information in the timeframes between Byuu's last email to me, the alleged phone call, and the document that Marcan posted."

He ends off the response by stating that Kiwi Farms is an entertainment site. "It is a lighthearted discussion forum that exists to talk about people. It's not a Jigsaw-esque torture chamber to teach people the value of life. It's Internet nerds gossiping about their favorite e-celebs. It's catty women talking about fat girls on YouTube. Sometimes, it's even anime avatars talking about vtubers. These are ordinary people who are having fun on the Internet, and everyone is welcome to join us. In the 8 years we've been around, Byuu is the first person with a thread on the forum to name the Kiwi Farms as a cause of suicide - despite previously claiming he did not care about it. I believe he has made choices regarding his medication (including the decision to ignore his doctor's orders by self-medicating HRT) that induced an altered state of mind. Regardless of the truth, Twitter's reaction to this sends a dangerous message to troubled people: the best form of revenge is a suicide note."

"I hope Byuu is alive and I wish him well. However, I will not be extorted."

On September 1, 2021, another Kiwifarms user, Chatspiracy Theorist, confirmed that no Americans died in Japan on the day Byuu was supposed to have, leading many to believe he's still alive.

The 2022 re-release of River City Girls Zero on the Nintendo Switch was dedicated to Near.