Just Politics

[blackhawks]

Here's the real big picture. Your source is a trove or RW batshit conspiracy theories and misinformation that has widely and repeatedly been discredited. Period.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Epoch_Times

Controversies

The Epoch Times has championed President Donald Trump's Spygate conspiracy theory in its news coverage and advertising, and the Epoch Media Group's Edge of Wonder videos on YouTube have spread the far-right, pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory.[18]

The Edge of Wonder hosts, according to The Daily Dot, "embrace QAnon completely" even though "almost nothing QAnon has foretold has actually taken place."[72] An NBC News report found that two of Edge of Wonder's hosts have been a creative director and chief photo editor at The Epoch Times respectively. The newspaper promoted Edge of Wonder videos in dozens of Facebook posts through 2019.[18]

During the February 2020 Iowa Democratic Caucuses, The Epoch Times shared viral disinformation from the conservative group Judicial Watch that falsely alleged inflated voter rolls.[73] The claim, which went viral on Facebook, was debunked by fact checkers and the Iowa secretary of state.[74][75] A Harvard media expert quoted by NBC News said The Epoch Times employed a "classic disinformation tactic" known as "trading up the chain," in which false stories are repackaged and shared.[73]

White House protocol controversies

In September 2018, The Epoch Times photographer Samira Bouaou broke White House protocol and handed Trump a folder during an official event.[76]

On August 13, 2020, The White House invited reporters from The Epoch Times and the right-wing news outlet Gateway Pundit to a press briefing. According to a report by The Washington Post, the "Gateway Pundit and Epoch Times both jumped the line with the White House's blessing starting on Thursday", prompting objections from the president of the White House Correspondents' Association.[77][78]

Ads banned by Facebook

During a six-month period in 2019, The Epoch Times spent more than $1.5 million on about 11,000 Facebook ads that NBC News said were "pro-Trump advertisements." NBC said the amount spent was more than any group except the Trump campaign itself.[18][23]

Political ad spending on Facebook in April 2019 through an account called "Coverage of the Trump Presidency by The Epoch Times" exceeded any politician's spending except Trump and Democrat Joe Biden.[79] Journalist Judd Legum wrote in May 2019 that The Epoch Times ads were "boosting Donald Trump and floating conspiracy theories about Joe Biden."[79]

In August 2019, Facebook banned The Epoch Times from advertising on its platform, after finding that the newspaper broke Facebook's political transparency rules by publishing pro-Trump subscription ads through sockpuppet pages such as "Honest Paper" and "Pure American Journalism."[59][25] A Facebook representative told NBC: "Over the past year we removed accounts associated with The Epoch Times for violating our ad policies, including trying to get around our review systems."[59]

The Epoch Times publisher, Stephen Gregory, wrote in response that the paper did not intend to violate Facebook's rules. The video ads, he wrote, "are overtly Epoch Times advertisements for our subscriptions," and "discuss The Epoch Times' editorial and feature content and encourage people to subscribe to our print newspaper."[59]

As Facebook banned The Epoch Times from advertising, the newspaper shifted its spending to YouTube. The Epoch Times has spent more than $1.8 million on YouTube ads, some promoting conspiracy theories, since May 2018.[57][21]

Removal of The BL (The Beauty of Life) from Facebook

In October 2019, the fact-checking website Snopes reported that The Epoch Times is closely linked to a large network of Facebook pages and groups called The BL (The Beauty of Life) that shares pro-Trump views and conspiracy theories such as QAnon. The BL has spent at least $510,698 on Facebook advertising. Hundreds of the ads were removed for violations of Facebook's advertising rules. The BL network of pages has 28 million followers on Facebook in total, according to Snopes.

The editor-in-chief of The BL recently worked as editor-in-chief of The Epoch Times, and several other BL employees are listed as current or former employees of The Epoch Times. The BL is registered in Middletown, New York, to an address that also is registered to Falun Gong's Sound of Hope Radio Network and is associated with the YouTube series Beyond Science, but Snopes found "the outlet as a whole is literally the English-language edition of Epoch Times Vietnam."[80][81] Snopes found that The BL uses more than 300 fake Facebook profiles based in Vietnam and other countries, using names, stock photos and celebrity photos in their profiles to emulate Americans, to administer more than 150 pro-Trump Facebook groups amplifying its content.[81][82]

An unnamed representative of The BL wrote to Snopes that "The BL has NO connection with The Epoch Times," and a "few of our staff has job experience … working in The Epoch Times, but now they are working full time in The BL." The Epoch Times' publisher, Stephen Gregory, said "The Epoch Times is not affiliated with the BL."[80]

In December 2019, Facebook announced it removed a large network of accounts, pages, and groups linked to The BL and Epoch Media Group for coordinated inauthentic behavior on behalf of a foreign actor. The network had 55 million followers on Facebook and Instagram, and $9.5 million had been spent on Facebook ads through its accounts.[83]

The New York Times reported that The BL had used fake profile photos generated by artificial intelligence. The Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Research Lab director Graham Brookie said the coordinated network of fake accounts demonstrated "an eerie, tech-enabled future of disinformation."

Facebook's head of security policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, said, "What's new here is that this is purportedly a U.S.-based media company leveraging foreign actors posing as Americans to push political content. We've seen it a lot with state actors in the past."[84][85]

COVID-19 coverage and misinformation

The Epoch Times is identified as spreading misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic in print and via social media including Facebook and YouTube.[86][87]

It has promoted anti-China rhetoric and conspiracy theories around the coronavirus outbreak, for example through an 8-page special edition called "How the Chinese Communist Party Endangered the World", which was distributed unsolicited in April 2020 to mail customers in areas of the United States, Canada, and Australia.[88][89] In the newspaper, the SARS-CoV-2 virus is known as the "CCP virus", and a commentary in the newspaper posed the question, "is the novel coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan an accident occasioned by weaponizing the virus at that [Wuhan P4 virology] lab?"[86][88] The paper's editorial board also claimed that COVID-19 patients can potentially be cured by "condemning the CCP."[36]

The misinformation tracker NewsGuard called the French page of The Epoch Times one of the "super-spreaders" of COVID-19 misinformation on Facebook, citing an Epoch Times article that suggested the virus was artificially created.[90][91] NewsGuard later changed the rating of the English edition of The Epoch Times from green to red.[19]

A story in The Epoch Times on February 17, 2020, shared a map from the internet that falsely alleged massive sulfur dioxide releases from crematoriums during the COVID-19 pandemic in China, speculating that 14,000 bodies may have been burned.[92] A fact check by AFP reported that the map was a NASA forecast taken out of context.[92]

A widely viewed video released by The Epoch Times on April 7, 2020, was flagged by Facebook as "partly false" for "the unsupported hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 is a bioengineered virus released from a Wuhan research laboratory."

The video featured Judy Mikovits, an anti-vaccination activist.[93][94] The fact-checker Health Feedback said of the video that "several of its core scientific claims are false and its facts, even when accurate, are often presented in a misleading way."[87]

A story by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on April 29, 2020, reported that some Canadians were upset to receive a special edition of The Epoch Times that called COVID-19 the "CCP virus". Later the CBC retracted a headline on its story that had quoted a recipient saying the special edition was "racist and inflammatory", and the CBC also retracted a claim that The Epoch Times edition had concluded that COVID-19 was a bioweapon.[88][95] Opinion columns published by The Toronto Sun accused the CBC of bias against The Epoch Times[96][97] and said the CBC's report may have misled readers into thinking The Epoch Times was spreading anti-Asian sentiment.[97]

Removal of TruthMedia from Facebook

On August 6, 2020, Facebook removed hundreds of fake accounts by a digital company called TruthMedia that promoted Epoch Times and NTD content and pro-Trump conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and protests in the United States.[98][99] The operation included 303 Facebook accounts, 181 pages, 44 Facebook groups and 31 Instagram accounts,[100] which in total were followed by more than 2 million people.[99] Snopes and NBC News reported that TruthMedia had ties to the Epoch Media Group,[101][99] but Stephen Gregory, publisher of The Epoch Times, denied this.[99]

TruthMedia, now banned from Facebook, continues to operate YouTube channels in Chinese, English, Japanese, and Vietnamese, and has accounts on Pinterest and Twitter.[98] It appears to have begun a petition to the White House to “start calling the novel coronavirus the CCP virus