Two hosts are bringing OAN’s misinformation and sloppy reporting to your For You page — but obscuring their affiliation with the network
Beatrice Mount
Published
Share
Comment
Two of One America News’ lesser-known news hosts, Stella Escobedo and Alicia Summers, are racking up hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok by repeating and reposting OAN’s far-right programming without giving any indication they’re affiliated with the network.
For OAN — a company dropped by three cable providers in a single year — TikTok could be a key way to expand its dwindling audience while amplifying the right-wing echo chamber.
TikTok has at least 1 billion active monthly users, about 150 million in the United States, and teenagers are the platform’s primary user base. Two-thirds of American teens are on TikTok, and many use TikTok for research in lieu of Google. It seems extremely unlikely TikTok users would have the background about OAN to question Escobedo and Summers’ content, especially when it lacks logos.
Shortly after joining OAN in 2021 and 2022, respectively, Summers and Escobedo began uploading short videos to their TikTok pages. Collectively, Escobedo and Summers have accumulated millions of views and over 1,459,500 likes with content often filmed on the OAN set or simply ripped straight from One America News reports.
Citation Screenshot from Tiktok User @AliciaSummersTV, accessed February 2, 2023
Citation Screenshot from Tiktok User @StellaEscobedoTV, accessed February 2, 2023
Media Matters found that on average, Escobedo and Summers earned upward of 48,000 and 52,000 views per video, respectively — nearly four times the number of viewers as OAN had when Nielsen last measured its audience in spring 2019 (14,000).
However, there’s no obvious indication of Escobedo and Summers‘ affiliation with the right-wing propaganda network in their account bios, and there is rarely any indication of their affiliation in their videos.
Media Matters analyzed 372 videos from Escobedo and Summers starting on their approximate first days at OAN — January 3, 2022 (the date of the first TikTok posted from an OAN set), and June 7, 2021, respectively — through December 31, 2022, looking for clear audio and/or visual mentions of OAN or its logo. Of the 372 videos, only 7 clearly showed their affiliation with OAN – 4 from Summers and 3 from Escobedo. Of the 7 videos that showed the hosts’ affiliation with OAN, 3 of them were posted in December. These include a video with at least 113,000 views accusing California’s first lady of spreading pornography (by providing schools with a documentary criticizing media representation of women), and a video with over 147,000 views legitimizing a right-wing media panic against a transgender YMCA patron simply trying to use a locker room.
151 of the 226 Summers videos and 106 of the 146 Escobedo videos MMFA analyzed used OAN footage. But aside from the 7 videos previously mentioned, Summers and Escobedo either cropped out the OAN logo or covered it up with text blocks.
Citation Screenshots from Tiktok User @AliciaSummersTV, accessed February 2, 2023, and uploaded August 26, 2022; July 13, 2022; April 27, 2022; and December 17, 2021
Citation Screenshots from Tiktok User @StellaEscobedoTV, accessed February 2, 2023, and uploaded September 22, 2022; August 12, 2022; June 3, 2022; and May 14, 2022
Compare this to Daniel Baldwin or Caitlin Sinclair — two other OAN reporters whose TikTok videos rarely surpass 10,000 views. Baldwin, who posts Trump rallies and OAN reels with election denialists under the page @DanTheRallyMan, frequently shares content with OAN logos clearly visible. Sinclair, similarly, has OAN mics visible in 3 out of the 8 videos posted to her page before December 31.
Unlike Baldwin and Sinclair, Escobedo and Summers appear to be aiming for a much more mainstream — not just MAGA — audience. They regularly encourage viewers to “follow me for your news” and use the hashtags #news, #learnfromme, and #LearnOnTikTok. Their top videos reflect this approach, offering run-of-the-mill reports about someone falling off an amusement park ride (over 491,000 views) and iPhone security (over 671,000 views).
To a layperson, Escobedo and Summers look like regular reporters. However, their TikToks are plastered with OAN’s signature brand of misleading, conspiratorial, and dubiously sourced news.
Escobedo and Summers regularly post selectively edited OAN interviews with anti-LGBTQ bigots, xenophobic extremists, and COVID-19 conspiracy theorists, portraying them as trustworthy pundits and activists.
Escobedo and Summers are serial misinformers on TikTok. Many of their videos violate community guidelines that prohibit harmful misinformation, including misleading and false content about COVID-19 and elections. TikTok’s COVID-19 misinformation policies prohibit “misinformation related to COVID-19, vaccines, and anti-vaccine disinformation.” TikTok’s election integrity guidelines prohibit videos that “erode trust in public institutions,” including videos alleging voter fraud, promoting unverified claims about polling stations, prematurely declaring a candidate’s victory, or suggesting votes won’t count.
Media Matters reviewed active TikTok accounts associated with four One American News personalities: news hosts Stella Escobedo and Alicia Summers and reporters Caitlin Sinclair and Daniel Baldwin. We checked whether they noted that they work at OAN in their profiles.
We then reviewed all TikTok videos on each account from their approximate hiring date through December 31, 2022. Through our live monitoring of OAN cross-checked with available, public online sources, we concluded that OAN employed Escobedo starting at least on January 3, 2022, Summers at least on June 9, 2021, Sinclair at least on October 1, 2019, and Baldwin at least on March 28, 2022.
We then reviewed all TikTok videos in the time periods identified for each OAN personality for whether their videos used OAN footage or whether the videos clearly showed the personalities’ affiliations with the network. We defined clear affiliation as any video that contained a visible OAN logo or included the personality stating that they worked for OAN in the script.
© 2023 Media Matters for America