Now I am even more sure that coincidence explains things better than a Masonic-like Theory.
I never heard tell of the Epoch Times until a few hours ago when a "sample" issue appeared in my mailbox. It's a weekly (in this case, out of Toronto and heavy on China xenophobia, if not racism) that wants you to pay $3 or $4 per issue to read its lies.
Kind of like those in Canada who have to subscribe to a cable "package" to get Fox News. Or the Ultra-Right/NeoFacist chumps in the States who send Trump and Manafort money.
Quite a few of the Q-nuts on Twitter tweet garbage from this conspiracy rag so I'm familiar with it. This is Chinese propaganda and disinformation being pushed for Trump.
Some of my relatives who are spread out all over the country also received the "free sample" paper. They thought it was a new local paper until they read all the b.s. published in it. It appears the Epoch Times are looking for new subscribers aka suckers as they peddle their disinformation nationally.
Here's more info on this crap publication that peddles conspiracies for China Don. So much for the "liberal media".
The Epoch TimesThe Epoch Times is a far-right international multi-language newspaper and media company affiliated with the Falun Gong new religious movement, based in Midtown Manhattan. The newspaper is part of the Epoch Media Group, which also operates New Tang Dynasty (NTD) Television. The Epoch Times has websites accessible from 35 countries but is blocked in mainland China.
The Epoch Times promotes far-right politicians in Europe and backs Donald Trump in the U.S.
A 2019 report by NBC News showed it to be the second-largest funder of pro-Trump Facebook advertising after the Trump campaign. The Epoch Media Group's news sites and YouTube channels have spread conspiracy theories such as QAnon and anti-vaccine misinformation.
The Epoch Times has championed 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 theories.
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. The claim, which went viral on Facebook, was debunked by fact checkers and the Iowa secretary of state. 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.
After Trump was defeated by Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, The Epoch Times produced a 93-minute video that falsely suggested widespread fraud in the counting; one interviewee, Lin Wood, falsely alleged that China had bought an American election vendor. Versions of the video on YouTube, the Epoch Times website and NTD were viewed hundreds of thousands of times.
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. 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. Journalist Judd Legum wrote in May 2019 that The Epoch Times ads were "boosting Donald Trump and floating conspiracy theories about Joe Biden."
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 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."
The Epoch Times is identified as spreading misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic in print and via social media including Facebook and YouTube. 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. 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?" The paper's editorial board also claimed that COVID-19 patients can potentially be cured by "condemning the CCP."
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. NewsGuard later changed the rating of the English edition of The Epoch Times from green to red.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Epoch_Times
