But The Epoch Times was apparently able to sidestep those rules before being caught.

The tactic mirrors that used by Russia’s Internet Research Agency to launder disinformation across social movements by creating impostor pages, according to Joan Donovan, director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center. “The weaponizing of advertising is crucial for growing the audiences for this disinformation,” she said.

Ms. Donovan added that researchers and journalists have essentially turned into “glorified content moderators,” searching for ad content that violates Facebook’s rules.

The Epoch Times spent around $2 million on Facebook ads, NBC News said, many of them pro-Trump. Facebook declined to comment on the publication’s amount of spending on its platform.