[19][22][23] The Epoch Media Group's news sites and YouTube channels have promoted conspiracy theories such as QAnon, the Great Replacement, anti-vaccine misinformation and false claims of fraud in the 2020 United States presidential election.

[55][56] Tax documents indicate that between 2012 and 2016, the group received $900,000 from a principal at Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund led at the time by the conservative political donor Robert Mercer.

[13] Since 2016, according to NBC News, The Epoch Times has promoted favorable coverage of Trump's campaign and presidency, and emphasized topics like Islamic terrorism and illegal immigration to the United States.

[17] Stefanie Albrecht, a reporter for the German broadcaster RTL who spent several days inside The Epoch Times's Berlin office while investigating the far right, said that the staffers she met were all Falun Gong practitioners who had no journalistic training and did not check facts, trusting instead in the alternative sources they consulted.

[18][12] In France, The Epoch Times gives "an unfettered platform to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the patriarch of the French far right, and his daughter, Marine, who leads the nationalist party her father founded", according to The New Republic.

Following the allegations of money laundering by the paper's CFO, Li issued a statement calling on Falun Gong adherents not to attack politicians from either political party.

[77] In 2012, a former People's Liberation Army Air Force officer testified to the United States Congressional-Executive Commission on China that he had been sentenced to four years of prison for distributing a "Nine Commentaries" DVD in Beijing.

[81] The Tuidang movement was called one of the top global events in 2011 by Russian economist Andrey Illarionov, who cited claims by The Epoch Times that over 100 million people had quit.

While acknowledging the "unnecessary violence" the Chinese Communist Party has inflicted, Ownby finds that the lack of balance and nuance in tone and style makes the editorials resemble "anti-Communist propaganda written in Taiwan in the 1950s".

[91] During the February 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses, The Epoch Times shared viral disinformation from the conservative group Judicial Watch that falsely alleged inflated voter rolls.

[14] A February 17, 2020, Epoch Times story shared a map from the internet that falsely alleged massive sulfur dioxide releases from crematoria during the COVID-19 pandemic in China, speculating that 14,000 bodies may have been burned.

[108] In February 2021, an investigator for EU DisinfoLab found that Tierra Pura, a Spanish-language website first launched in Argentina in March 2020 that publishes COVID-19 misinformation, is closely linked to The Epoch Times and Falun Gong.

[46][117] A Facebook representative told NBC: "Over the past year we removed accounts associated with The Epoch Times for violating our ad policies, including trying to get around our review systems.

[118] In October 2019, the fact-checking website Snopes reported close links between The Epoch Times and a large network of Facebook pages and groups called The BL (The Beauty of Life) that shared pro-Trump views and conspiracy theories such as QAnon.

The Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Research Lab director Graham Brookie said the coordinated network of fake accounts demonstrated "an eerie, tech-enabled future of disinformation".

[124] On August 6, 2020, Facebook removed hundreds of fake accounts by a digital company called TruthMedia that promoted Epoch Times and NTD content and pro-Trump conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and protests in the United States.

[126][125] In March 2021, Politico reported that SafeChat, a social media platform rife with disinformation and conspiracy theories about President Joe Biden that is popular with Trump supporters and Chinese dissidents, was closely linked to The Epoch Times and Falun Gong.

[130] In one instance, Chinese diplomatic officials made threats against media for reporting Falun Gong-related content; in other cases, advertisers and distributors have been threatened for supporting The Epoch Times.

[140][141] In April 2006, a reporter with temporary Epoch Times press credentials unfurled a protest banner and heckled China's leader Hu Jintao at a summit with President George W. Bush, shouting, "Stop him from killing!"

[53] In August 2020, the White House Correspondents' Association objected to the Trump administration's bending of COVID-19 social distancing rules in press briefings to favor The Epoch Times, The Gateway Pundit and One America News Network.

[145][91] Ming Xia, a political science professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, wrote in 2007 that The Epoch Times represents part of Falun Gong's strategic effort to expand to non-practitioners, and "embed itself into the large civil society for influence and legitimacy".

[53] The misinformation tracker NewsGuard said that The Epoch Times "fails to gather and present information responsibly, rarely corrects or clarifies errors and remains opaque as to its ownership and funding".

[12][14] The Epoch Times has been criticized by some scholars for biases, particularly regarding the Chinese Communist Party and mainland China issues, as well as for being a "mouthpiece" of the Falun Gong movement.

[151] James To, a New Zealand political scientist, described The Epoch Times as the "primary mouthpiece" of Falun Gong, writing that it "lacks credibility", despite the newspaper posing a "viable threat to the CCP" by publishing articles about the party's negative aspects.

[154] Seth Hettena wrote in The New Republic that The Epoch Times "has built a global propaganda machine, similar to Russia's Sputnik or RT, that pushes a mix of alternative facts and conspiracy theories that has won it far-right acolytes around the world".

"[74] Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at University of California, Berkeley, said in 2005 that "It's hard to vouch for their quality because it's difficult to corroborate, but it's not something to be dismissed as pure propaganda.

[33][156][157] According to Ownby, the newspaper has been praised and also criticized for a perceived bias against the CCP, and support of Falun Gong practitioners and other dissidents such as Tibetans, Taiwanese independence advocates, democracy activists, Uyghurs and others.

[147] Haifeng Huang, professor of political science at the University of California, said, "I'm not exactly clear why they have become such a major pro-Trump voice" but "part of it is perhaps because they regard President Trump as tough on the Chinese government and therefore a natural ally for them".

[72] A report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based think tank, said the German edition of The Epoch Times "primarily runs anti-West, anti-American and pro-Kremlin content—a high proportion of this content is based on unverified information".

[159] In March 2022, Angelo Carusone, head of watchdog group Media Matters for America, said that The Epoch Times "go[es] where the center for the strongest infrastructure or possibility of getting as much audience and influence and reach is", and added that this complexity makes it "radically different and hard to understand".