Background Information

Despite amassing one of the largest social media followings of any news outlet, The Epoch Times’ operations remain tremendously opaque.

Last month, NBC News’ Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins wrote a fantastic, investigative piece on the media organization.

Below are some of the key takeaways from their 5-month long investigation:

The Epoch Times is a New York-based nonprofit news outlet that has been around for nearly two decades Prior to 2016, The Epoch Times generally stayed away from U.S. politics Their ownership/operation is closely linked to Falun Gong, a Chinese spiritual community with the stated goal of toppling China’s government The Epoch Times operates alongside digital video outlet New Tang Dynasty (NTD) — both entities are part of the Epoch Media Group umbrella In the last 6 months, The Epoch Times has spent more than $1.5 million on about 11,000 pro-Trump Facebook ads (more than any organization outside of the Trump campaign itself) In April (at the peak of their ad spend), videos from The Epoch Times and NTD “combined for around 3 billion views on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, ranking 11th among all video creators across platforms and outranking every other traditional news publisher, according to data from the social media analytics company Tubular.” Epoch Media Group’s network of news sites and YouTube channels have functioned as a conduit for conspiracy theories — including anti-vaccination propaganda and QAnon — to reach the mainstream The Trump family seems to be fond of The Epoch Times — the president’s Facebook page has linked to their content at least 6 times this year and Donald Trump Jr. has tweeted their stories as well A former journalist with The Epoch Times described working conditions akin to Russian troll farms (and where his articles were edited to remove outside criticism of Trump) Epoch Media Group’s business has been thriving in the Trump era — The Epoch Times doubled their 2016 revenue in 2017 (bringing in $8.1 million) while NTD grew revenue by 150% over the same period (earning $18 million in 2017)

Whereas NBC News’ research focused on Facebook, I delved into The Epoch Times across Twitter’s platform—pulling 122,892 tweets (inclusive of retweets) that include a link to The Epoch Times’ content (tweets between August 16th and August 22nd, 2019).

This was done to better understand the types of accounts sharing links to The Epoch Times.

In this post, we’ll explore the profile attributes/behaviors of Twitter accounts driving traffic to The Epoch Times.

Let’s jump right into the data.