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FreedomHacker reported on November 29, 2016:

Now, Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, who appears to have vanished mid-October, hasn’t been seen alive or heard from since October 4th. Even after recent “interviews with Assange,” a large portion of supporters are still asking the question, where is Assange?

The Twitter hashtag #proofoflife gives links to:

  • The Outer Dark video (24-Dec-2016) conjectures that he might have been abducted to a brainwashing room with a gun to his head, with a list of claims about vaguely related incidents.

  • The Outer Dark video (3-Dec-2016) claims an October 30th interview with John Pilger has "anomalies", conjecturing that it may have been generated by computer.

  • rt.com, an article about a mid December interview with a journalist from La Republica being misrepresented by The Guardian.

Has Julian Assange been missing from the Ecuadorian Embassy since October 4th?

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  • Welcome to Skeptics! The claim on that site is not "Julian Assange is dead" - they are careful not to say that. The claim is "Julian Assange hasn't been seen by the public, and it is weird that no-one is bending over backwards to meet our increasing demands for evidence." If you want to ask if that is true, please focus the question.
    – Oddthinking
    Commented Jan 2, 2017 at 13:19
  • The RT article says that a guardian article about an interview contained lies. It doesn't say anything about the interview not being authentic.
    – Christian
    Commented Jan 2, 2017 at 14:47
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    At least one website that used to claim that Assange is dead has now r̶e̶t̶r̶a̶c̶t̶e̶d̶ altered their claim a̶n̶d̶ ̶a̶p̶o̶l̶o̶g̶i̶s̶e̶d̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶i̶r̶ ̶f̶a̶l̶s̶e̶ ̶c̶l̶a̶i̶m̶s̶.
    – Oddthinking
    Commented Jan 4, 2017 at 14:49
  • There’s the somewhat related, and potentially more credible claim, that Assange is no longer in control of the Wikileaks private keys. Commented Jan 20, 2017 at 10:53

1 Answer 1

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The links you provide contain many ridiculous claims that need separate questions to address individually.

However, they also contain counter-evidence to the overarching claim.

  • The first Outer Dark video mentions that actor/activist Pamela Anderson visited him. Anderson was reported visiting him in mid October and also again in mid-November, well after the October 4th deadline.
  • The rt.com link explains:

    Assange spoke to the Italian newspaper’s correspondent Stefania Maurizi last week when she visited him in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

    That puts the interview in late-December.

  • The first Outer Dark video mentions the Sean Hannity phone interview. This was in December

    Most recently, in December, Assange called into Hannity’s radio show, in which the host gushed to Assange that “you’ve done us a favor” in exposing gaps in U.S. cybersecurity.

Hopefully, the face-to-face Hannity interview scheduled to be aired today (You aren't a publicist for Fox News, are you?) will put this to rest for all but the most hard-core conspiracy theorists.

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    Obviously a body double, or maybe computer retouching of the video :-) I mean, how could you be sure it's him, barring fingerprints or genetic testing, and then there's always the chance that the fingerprints on file were replaced...
    – jamesqf
    Commented Jan 3, 2017 at 18:36

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