A network of YouTube channels, which have not disclosed their connection to Epoch Times, has been propagating election disinformation since Election Day
Craig Silverman / BuzzFeed News : Tweets: @happyfeminist , @gitagovinda , and @craigsilverman Tweets: @happyfeminist : Like tech companies aren't done. They still haven't even done the bare minimum. https://twitter.com/... Patricia Sauthoff / @gitagovinda : We will talk about Falun Gong this semester in my class. They have a booth outside the local farmer's market in my neighborhood every week. The final is a religion in media assignment. I might have to swap out a reading and have them read this instead. https://twitter.com/... Craig Silverman / @craigsilverman : NEW: A network of YouTube channels sprung up after the election as part of a disinfo campaign to keep Trump in office. They now have more than 1m subscribers and 10s of millions of views. I found they're connected to pro-Trump media outlet Epoch Times: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
Craig Silverman's reporting lands mid-arc: days earlier, a study found YouTube's move to cut recommendations to fringe channels worked but made Fox News the most recommended source for election videos, and a follow-up report showed fraud-claim videos still drew more than 138M views during election week despite those efforts. What is new here is attribution — the disinformation is coming from a coordinated channel network whose connection to The Epoch Times is hidden from viewers.
The undisclosed-affiliation pattern is not one-off: months later, Politico reported that social network SafeChat was likewise a rising MAGA and anti-CCP hub with undisclosed ties to The Epoch Times, suggesting an organization building parallel distribution across platforms rather than relying on any single outlet.
First-order effects
- Viewers of these channels are consuming election-fraud content with no visible signal of who funds or coordinates it, defeating YouTube's own labeling and sourcing cues.
- YouTube's moderation apparatus, built around policing individual videos and recommendation edges, now faces a publisher-shaped problem: enforcing against content one upload at a time leaves the coordinating network intact.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers and platform-trust teams get a fresh case for demanding ownership transparency from channels, since recommendation-side fixes alone demonstrably did not stop the spread.
- Rival platforms inherit the same audience as the network diversifies — the SafeChat episode shows the same operator extending undisclosed distribution beyond YouTube, forcing each platform to re-detect the pattern independently.
Third-order effects
- If undisclosed-network publishing keeps outpacing per-video enforcement, the durable fix shifts toward disclosure rules and provenance standards rather than takedowns — yet YouTube's later decision to stop removing false 2020-fraud claims outright (rolling back that policy) points the opposite way, toward platforms retreating from adjudicating election claims at all.
- The longer-term structure is a two-track information ecosystem: legacy outlets with visible mastheads competing against coordinated, opaque channel networks whose scale — YouTube's daytime TV-sized audience makes this a broadcast-tier medium — is invisible to the average viewer.
The trend: Coordinated political media networks are moving toward undisclosed, multi-platform distribution faster than platform moderation — which tightened after the 2020 election and has since loosened — can attribute and contain them.