In the last Hacker News thread, people were so sure that the government jailed him for criticizing the party. Even though there was no evidence of such, people just assumed it MUST be true because the CCP MUST be evil. And before Jack Ma "disappeared", people were worried about Jack Ma and Ant Group being a national security threat, because of his ties with CCP. Because "CCP evil". No matter the facts, people just co…
That's because in any other moderately functioning country, it takes at most a few phone calls by journalists to clarify the matter: "Excuse me, billionaire Mr. X hasn't been seen for days. Could you verify if the police arrested him?" "Oh really? We have no record of such an arrest - in any case, arresting someone like him will generate five hundred tweets within minutes, wouldn't it?" "You're absolutely right, have a good day!"
There's only one other country where I've seen high-profile figures just "disappearing" regularly: North Korea.