A few stray thoughts from my story in today's paper about The Epoch Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/24/technology/epoch-times-influence-falun-gong.html

On one level, this is a story about a new religious movement building its own media outlet -- which has happened in the past, from the Christian Science Monitor to the Washington Times.

But it's also a story about social media companies, and how their product decisions cascade through media and politics.

In 2015, The Epoch Times had been doing solid, down-the-middle journalism, building a credible reputation. But traffic was down and it was losing money.

So it did what a lot of publishers did. It set up a whole bunch of new Facebook pages, and pivoted toward content that performed well -- in this case, hyperpartisan news and Upworthy-style clickbait.

As my story reports, the Epoch Times got help from its Vietnamese affiliate, DKN, which a former employee told me had used bots and fake accounts to inflate its traffic.

In any case, the paper grew like crazy. Tens of millions of new followers, basically overnight.

Filling Facebook with animal videos, partisan outrage-bait, and conspiracy theories worked, in a way that doing credible journalism hadn't.

Other publishers did this to make money. The Epoch Times did it to "save sentient beings" and fight the CCP. But it's the same game.

Other journalists, including @BrandyZadrozny and @oneunderscore__, have written about the political and spiritual reasons The Epoch Times went pro-Trump. Those are important.

But it was also, in part, a rational response to the incentives Facebook had created.

The Epoch Times used Facebook to build a massive audience. When they got punished for breaking rules, they set up shop on YouTube, and ran a similar playbook there.

They played the game on two platforms, and they're now a huge, global force in right-wing media.

There's so much about The Epoch Times that is unique -- the Falun Gong connection, the secrecy around its operations and finances, etc. -- but it's a pretty archetypal example of what happens when a publisher sees that the rules have changed, and acts accordingly.

The moral of the story isn't as simple as "Facebook bad" or "YouTube bad." But these decisions weren't inevitable. People at these companies chose to optimize for engagement and outsource curation to robots, and it changed everything.