Epoch Times, Punished by Facebook, Gets a New Megaphone on YouTube

Falun Gong is not a "persecuted spiritual practice." It is a cult, whose purposes are primarily political. Qi Gong, the spiritual (and physical) discipline that Falun Gong falsely claims to represent, existed for centuries before Falun Gong was formed, and continues to be freely practiced by millions of people all over China. Anyone who's ever practiced martial arts or visited a public park in China should be aware of this.

Epoch Times has evolved from a free paper circulating in Chinese communities into a 30some language global phenomenon persistently and mysteriously. Very much like its sister arm Shen Yun which has grown from an unknown folksy dance troupe coming out of nowhere to an international ubiquitous touring spectacle. There are also tv channels and Radiance Chinese restaurants in Manhattan, all part of the Falun Gong network, supposedly. All operating in total secrecy. Theories abound, yet no one seems to know who are behind this juggernaut of an enterprise. And those once also ubiquitous ‘persecuted’ Falun Gong practitioners on the sidewalks of New York, who also seemed to have descended overnight by plane loads, merely foot soldiers of a much bigger scheme? One wonders.

This rag started showing up randomly at the base of my driveway some months ago. I don’t know why, or how to stop it, so I use it in my charcoal chimney when I grill. It burns more or less like a reputable newspaper.

I'm a Former Epoch Media Group (EMG) employee. This article got the way EMG operates spot on. EMG and all its subsidiaries are 100% connected to Falun Gong. The CEO and Li Hong Zi communicate. We'd receive feedback from the "master" every so often. I was never a practitioner so the office politics were beyond bizarre. At my location (not their NY office) all of the practitioner employees would read Falun Gong book together during their lunch break. Those who participated (everyone except me and 3 other non-practitioners) were forced to cut their 1.5 hour lunch in half to accommodate Falun Gong study. The office was full of oddities. I remember a couple people lost their jobs because they refused to fill out a weekly "practitioner report" where they tracked the amount of time spent studying the book and doing exercises. Before being fired, those employees were berated and ostracized by colleagues. Super weird. The official reasons management gave for supporting Trump were for his "traditional values" as well as his tough stance against China.

It's a marriage of convenience - Falun Gong doesn't much care where the money comes from to support its main mission, and American political conservatives are willing to pay an access fee to use a seemingly independent publisher. In the digital world, their two separate audiences need not be very aware of each other or of the monetary arrangement. Who's the mail-order bride, destined to disappointment, isn't yet clear.

I was ‘introduced’ to the Epoch Times via an ad seen while reading NY Times digital. What’s up with that?

Took 20 years but finally some American realize why Falun Gong was banned in China. They tried to have Beijing declare Falun Gong the official state religion in 1999. As for why it targets the most jingoistic part of American politics, isn’t it obvious? Falun Gong love to run fake news on China and who love to read those fake news as prove America is the greatest and needs more military spending? On another level, Falun Gong is deeply religious and explains 2008 Sichuan earthquake, homosexuality, and the recent 2019-nCoV as heaven punishing the wicked. Guess who shares that view?

The Epoch Times IS Fake News. It is pure propaganda.

I tend to watch a lot of how to video on You Tube. It's the one sick media outlet I view. I have never booked face or twitted. The commercials on You Tube are often conspiracy theory garbage, and if not they are still very stupid like most commercials. I am amazed that they have any affect on humans at all, but then, I would expect that most have a brain, which is clearly not the case. Now You Tube has changed it's format some in that it no longer allows you to reject their suggestions. I used to reject any political/conspiracy video junk like right wing media propaganda, but now I can no longer do that and am fed a mix of what I might normally watch and right wing conspiracy videos. Of course I don't watch them, but there they are, things I'll never watch, fed to me by an organization who is clearly trying to brainwash all the moron serfs to be good right wing fanatics believing in things that just aren't real. You Tube is just another evil corporation. I will never buy anything that is advertised there. Of course I never buy anything that is advertised anyway (including the stupid adds in the NYTs). If corporations had good products they wouldn't need to advertise, but since they only sell useless garbage they have to fool the stupid people. It must work since they keep doing it. I can't fathom how weak one must be to be susceptible to such garbage.

The Epoch Times makes Infowars look like the NYT by comparison. I don't think Mr. Roose or your paper really appreciates just how beyond the fringe they are.

We're doomed.

the falun gong folks are great they teach tai chi for free, the communist party of china hates them and tries to destroy them but they fail.

In Toronto the Epoch Times is usually free... so, who's paying for it? I guess ads, but I genuinely didn't know it was an international organization. Interesting article - thank you

I've been seeing these ads for a while now, but only on the live streams of Pod Save America, which seems like a really weird place for a pro-trump outlet to advertise.

Epoch Times only exists only because of gullible, uneducated people, and YouTube is probably the best platform to spread their bile because it requires little or no viewer engagement (no big words to read). With the multi-year failure of public education, the Epoch Times will enjoy a bumper crop of blank slates to impress.

The bespectacled spokesman for the “news agency” has a very interesting Eastern European accent. Funny how that works.

YouTube used to show these ads to me, repeatedly. They were annoying enough that I felt motivated to go through the process of clicking through their "don't show me this ad again" menus... which I had to keep doing, because they would be nice enough to stop showing me the specific ad in question - but would then proceed to bombard me with another ad for The Epoch Time, that would be just as insufferable and full of crazy conspiracy talk... They had quite a few of them apparently, each one featuring this same young gentleman, identified in this article as "an employee [of The Epoch TImes] Roman Balmakov"... In addition to being an ver-the-top annoying peddler of conspiracy theories and fluent speaker of MAGA-talk, there was something inexplicably familiar about his whole demeanor that I could not quite put my finger on... Seeing the young fellow's unmistakably Russian name has finally helped me put two and two together... To be clear, I'm not implying that the Russian name of their employee somehow means that The Epoch Times is a Russian intelligence operation. All I'm saying is that his certain mannerisms, despite seemingly native American English, are now making sense to me, as a fellow Russian. But this happens to also be true about the style that trumpists have adopted in recent years in general - this unique brand of aggressive shamelessness - just keeps striking me as strangely familiar and something I used to see in Russian propaganda only.

Year after year, Shen Yun advertises as portraying 5,000 years of Chinese culture in just two hours. However, it is a religious movement that denies evolution and science, claims the earth was inhabited by aliens, demonizes atheists and homosexuals, and condemns mixed marriages. The print edition of The Epoch Times can be found, free of charge, next to the free print real estate and car sale papers set out in grocery stores in my town. I’m not sure that either is making a political impact here.

All over the country we see these ads promoting a show called "Shen Yun". Please be aware its connection with Epoch Times. If you find Epoch Times views objectionable, do not support it by buying tickets for Shen Yun.

I’ve never seen any reporting about the actual views of the Falun Gong. From some searching, they seem like a racist, anti-scientific sect that believes racial intermarriage is an alien conspiracy to weaken humankind, not just a persecuted “spiritual practice”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teachings_of_Falun_Gong. Of course, they should be allowed to practice their religion and the Chinese government shouldn’t persecute them, but we should not take them seriously merely because they are persecuted in another country.

And who is to say this article doesn't fit its own description of disinformation? It is filled with innuendo, half-baked claims that equate advertising with conspiracy, and narrative tidbits describing nothing more than Trump liking the paper -- spun into insinuations of collusion. Conservatives are being systematically silenced. There was a time when the Times cared about suppression of speech. This nonsense indicates they are on the side of the oppressors.

Speaking of disinformation...three years of the Russia collusion lie?

Isn’t it bad enough that the Falun Gong inundates us with Shen Yun advertising? Where does all that advertising money come from? How can I hide from it?

Under the First Amendment, anyone can publish a newspaper with any content they like. The only limitations are the libel laws and how much cash you have. None of the stories have to be true, provided they are not libelous. We're pretty much back to the 18th century, when the newspapers were pretty lively, to say the least. Only since the beginning of the 20th century did they become dull repositories of conventional opinions.

I went to Shen Yun and the dancing and story telling was wonderful. I did have some misgivings about it after reading the program and it’s tendency toward picturing the troupe (out of NYC) as the savior of Chinese traditional dance and ancient Chinese history. These misgivings turned into distaste as I inquired of someone in mainland China who assured that such art forms are alive and well on the mainland. Shen Yun and it’s advertising has a distinct resemblance to influence campaigns in general. When I want to see authentic Chinese historical performance art next time I will go to China. I feel for people who have been persecuted in the past but I do not want to be persecuted by their mentacidal harassment.

Believing a conspiracy theory provides an assumed elevation or privilege, and a sense of agency and righteousness. You can criticize what appears to be a stunning lack of critical thinking, but it's human nature they are preying on. These videos establish disinformation, and it is plenty effective. We do not have the tools we need to combat this phenomenon and it's a real problem for our society and our democracy.

As the NYT reported yesterday, YouTube stated that it will be cracking down on misleading political ads. Let’s hope these videos are categorized as such. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/technology/youtube-misinformation-election.html

The story here should not be that a couple of inconsequential clowns have developed a bogus news platform, it should be that a multi-billion-dollar corporation feels the need to retain those clowns as customers.

The Epoch Times is part of an international alt-right propaganda machine. See, for example, its presence in Germany: https://newrepublic.com/article/155076/obscure-newspaper-fueling-far-right-europe Its efforts seem remarkably similar to the propaganda efforts of the Russian government.

"On Monday, it published a story containing unproven suggestions" "unproven suggestions" ? If something is proven it's already not a suggestion.

Obviously flagging as “inappropriate” every time their ad showed did nothing as it would show repeatedly sequentially for every video. I guess $1 million is more important to a financially desperate Google. “The Epoch Times was formed in part to speak out against the Chinese government’s persecution of Falun Gong practitioners.” Too bad they have now discredited their movement completely by allying themselves to the trump misinformation and propaganda machine. Who knew the truth and factual reporting is “too biased and left-wing”?

It’s been relentlessly aired on you tube for many months. Maybe a ear now. Obviously trump faux news propaganda. Why does headline make it like news? Glad you’re exposing this dangerous activity but the horse has been out of the barn for a long time.

TV ruined us. People can't tell the difference between what's real and what's imaginary when they watch screens. There used to be marked boundaries between what was real and what was imaginary, what was generally accepted fact and what was opinion open to dispute. People can't tell the difference anymore, until the situation touches their bodies. Most people's situations now, are lived onscreen. When governance of the G.E.D. Testing Service moved from the Department of Education to the Department of Labor around 2000, one of the changes made to the test was the elimination of "Fact vs. Opinion" questions. We don't want to know if something is true or not, anymore. We just want to know if the source of the information has power, such as a "celebrity platform," and it fits the way we imagine things to be.

As a former and perhaps the first American to practice Falun Gong, I can say that I'm appalled at the organizations admiration for Donald J. Trump. Every major directive comes from Li Hongzhi and he really favors the right wing of the republican party. He was also a big supporter of George W. Bush. I'm certain that Li Hongzhi and his followers would love to see major reforms from China including the freedom of Falun Gong practitioners still in jail and still being persecuted. I started to practice partly because I believed in the major tenets, "Truth, Compassion and Tolerance. This president has none of those qualities. The ends rarely justify the means.

It seems to me that a viewer has to search for this stuff on You Tube. I never see anything like this when I go on the site. I've only seen a couple of political ads before videos, but I always click right through them to start the video. If this stuff is on You Tube and people who want to view it have to search for it, I don't see the harm. At least in my experience, it doesn't just pop up at me. And, if it did I'd get rid of it.

YouTube is one of the primary purveyors of disinformation and hate groups. And yet they always seem to be able to fly under the radar while we all target Facebook.

Does 20 million times count the number of time I have clicked "skip ads" after seeing the first 3 seconds?

And as soon as I see Roman Balmakov's face, skip, skip, skip. Hopefully people are getting better at recognizing spin.

It's bad enough that over the past couple of years Youtube has become a platform crawling with ads. (Well, an ad-free Youtube wasn't going to last forever, so fair enough.) But now we've got these things from this group starring this guy, and every day my mouse pointer is poised over the "skip ads" button for me to left click at the earliest possible nano-second. And, seriously, these guys seem like about 20% of the ads Youtube tries to shove down my throat. Once Youtube completely drops the option to skip ads after the first 5 seconds (as they've done for their sponsors who are presumable willing to pony up the extra bucks) and won't let you read from another browser tab while the ad is running (because they sense when you're not on their tab), Youtube is history in my life. These ads in general are obnoxious, and this conspiracy group's particularly so. Intolerably so. For starters, Youtube, you could ban all political ads. Yes, you'd only be making a kajillion dollars a year instead of a kajillion and a half, but you'd get by ... and hold on to more customers.

Hearing stuff like this makes me glad that I decided to pay for YouTube’s “premium” service, which is commercial-free.

By now every scammer and political dirty trickster knows that there are a staggering number of people who believe arrant nonsense and lack the critical thinking skills and education to recognize propaganda and disinformation. But the worst part of it is that these are some of the most reliable voters, whose easily manipulable anger drives them to the polls regularly to strike back at those they have been told to hate and fear. The right-wing has successfully co-opted this zombie army of angry know-nothing voters to support politicians and policies that benefit the wealthiest interests at the expense of the rest of us. Meanwhile those who allegedly stand with the majority can't even competently run a caucus. It doesn't look good for anything changing.

The point of operations like this is not to make money. They almost never do actually turn a profit. It is simply a way to launder soft money contributions from conservatives donors both domestic and foreign and use them to distribute pro laissez-faire capitalist propaganda. They are not news services anymore than Pravda was back in the day. They are mouthpieces of the people who really control the world: the rich. Call them what they are please.

I notice that trumpies have no complicated deep-state conspiracy theories, even with the rich opportunity provided here. Falun Gong? Anyhoo, I read the Epoch Times for a while when they intruded on my FB newsfeed, but I had them pegged right away. For example, just look at the pic in this article. "Crisis on the Border", showing some really well behaved moms, dads and kids standing wearily in a line. No pics EVER of thousands of MS13 gang members swimming in huge human rafts to overwhelm BP agents, nothing. Just whipping up weird white nationalism. We have a free press in America, so I'd never say they had to stop publishing, but then Daily Stormer gets to publish too. Adults can discern foolish lies from bias.

Bias and partisanship in the merdia are actually quite encouraged. particularly when said merdia is on the PC side of the narrative.

This is so disturbing! Now I'm sorry I went to see Shen Yun! I don't understand how "spiritual" people could support Trump.

It’s an overwhelming problem.

“I’m not exactly clear why they have become such a major pro-Trump voice”... That's where the rubes are.

Bring back the Fairness Doctrine. It's obvious we can't handle the internet or social media.

Our digital era is definitely post-truth. As long as YouTube and others are the wild west of news sources, democracies like the US are a small step away from an even bigger catastrophe than the current president.