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A North Carolina real-estate agent who says his Facebook account was hacked years ago was surprised to learn this week that a page he previously used to market local listings was now being administered by a popular conservative media company with ties to Chinese dissident groups.
The Facebook page, titled The News Express and boasting nearly a million subscribers, housed dozens of advertisements encouraging users to subscribe to The Epoch Times. It was one of a handful of vaguely branded Facebook pages used in recent months to market the newspaper, generally with appeals to supporters of President Donald Trump.
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But The News Express page previously went by a different moniker. According to information on the page, it was formerly called “Steven King - Allen Tate Realtors,” and used by King to market properties in the Charlotte area. King says his Facebook page was hacked around 2013 and subsequently co-opted by a Vietnamese man named Lê Thái Trần.
The account, King said, had administrative access to his professional Facebook page, which in 2015 changed its name from Steven King - Allen Tate Realtors to The News Express. In 2017, the page ran its first paid Facebook ad, a video hyping Trump and promoting an Epoch Times Vietnamese-language video broadcaster called Đại Kỷ Nguyên, or DKN.
It’s not clear how the page ended up in the possession of The Epoch Times, an increasingly popular conservative news source in the U.S. with ties to the Chinese dissident group Falun Gong. In an email, Ken Truong, who manages Facebook marketing for the company, called it a “bizarre situation” and said the page was taken down after inquiries on Wednesday.
“The page was managed by a former employee who left the company in 2016,” Truong wrote. “From what I understand, he was working with third parties to develop our Facebook presence. We are looking into this, and take this situation extremely seriously. After this employee left, the page was managed by our Facebook promotions team. We were unaware of the issues you raised and were shocked to learn about them. We are notifying Facebook of the situation.”
Many of The News Express’ ads are still accessible through Facebook’s political ad archive. The ads, like other Epoch Times promos on separate pages, feature videos of the same newspaper employees promoting its Trump-friendly coverage, and link to the website truthandtradition.news, where visitors are prompted to subscribe to the paper.
The News Express’ Facebook ads, the page said, were paid for by an entity called Chronicle Media. The same entity is the reported funder of ads on another page, Patriots of America, running identical Epoch Times subscription promotions.
Last week, PAY DIRT noted the proliferation of stand-alone Facebook pages, including Patriots of America, devoted primarily to running paid ads promoting The Epoch Times. They’re part of a huge social-media advertising push by the newspaper to recruit new readers, especially those who believe Trump has not received a fair shake from the political press.
For Stevens, it was just a strange development in a years-old ordeal. “So weird that we are even having this conversation,” he said in a text message. “Thanks I guess haha.”
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