Canada’s National Observer has found that The Epoch Times has now set its sights on Canadians. In the past 12 months, the organization has spent over $300,000 on Facebook and Instagram ads promoting political surveys to collect the emails of Canadians using a series of anonymous pages. Meta failed to detect the ads, allowing them to be viewed more than 22 million times, despite the company’s repeated promises to prevent banned organizations from circumventing its policies.

The case exposes what experts call a “simulacra of transparency” — the appearance of platform oversight without real enforcement, said Robert Neubauer, a communications professor at the University of Winnipeg who studies digital influence operations. “All they have to do is just change the name, and they can use the exact same content.”

Neubauer warns that this lack of enforcement is a symptom of a greater shift away from moderation. In January 2025, Meta removed its independent fact-checking program on Facebook and Instagram in the US, which was designed to limit the spread of false information.

Neubauer worries that similar changes could soon be rolled out in Canada, creating a “free for all” for disinformation campaigns.