Trump and Facebook has made The Epoch Times a partisan powerhouse.

Many of these people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation, or still had family in Falun Gong.Įmbracing Mr. The investigation included interviews with more than a dozen former Epoch Times employees, as well as internal documents and tax filings. In 2006, an Epoch Times reporter disrupted a White House visit by the Chinese president by shouting, “Evil people will die early.”īut the organization and its affiliates have grown, in part, by relying on sketchy social media tactics, pushing dangerous conspiracy theories and downplaying their connection to Falun Gong, an investigation by The Times has found. It is a remarkable success story for Falun Gong, which has long struggled to establish its bona fides against Beijing’s efforts to demonize it as an “evil cult,” partly because its strident accounts of persecution in China can sometimes be difficult to substantiate or veer into exaggeration. In August, a reporter from The Epoch Times asked a question at a White House press briefing. The president and his family have shared articles from the paper on social media, and Trump administration officials have sat for interviews with its reporters. Today, The Epoch Times and its affiliates are a force in right-wing media, with tens of millions of social media followers spread across dozens of pages and an online audience that rivals those of The Daily Caller and Breitbart News, and with a similar willingness to feed the online fever swamps of the far right. In an April 2017 email to the staff obtained by The New York Times, the paper’s leadership envisioned that the Facebook strategy could help turn The Epoch Times into “the world’s largest and most authoritative media.” It could also introduce millions of people to the teachings of Falun Gong, fulfilling the group’s mission of “saving sentient beings.”

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