Mayor Zohran Mamdani's communications team ignored an explicit internal directive barring the use of Signal for city business, and used the encrypted app to coordinate with roughly 200 influencers while auto-deleting the conversations.
The directive could not have been clearer. On January 15, Mamdani's chief counsel Ramzi Kassem sent a memo to City Hall staff spelling out the rule in plain language: "You should not use WhatsApp, Signal, or any other communications app or platform for work." The memo reminded employees that New York's records laws require preservation of all emails and messages. In early March, the administration held a training session to walk workers through the policy.
Staff in the mayor's New Media and Cultural Communications office kept using Signal anyway. Director Emilia Rowland and others on her team chatted with the influencer network on the app, with messages set to auto-delete, making them forever inaccessible to the public. The arrangement only came to light after New York Post reporters began reaching out about the encrypted conversations.
The purpose, as described in the Post's reporting, was a push to tap into pro-Mamdani influencers from his campaign to prop up the administration. Approximately 200 influencers were part of the coordinated effort, a significant taxpayer-funded messaging operation running on a platform the mayor's own lawyer had banned.
What made the episode worse was Kassem's own response. After news of the encrypted chats broke, the chief counsel issued a public statement claiming, "There is no City policy against using Signal." That statement directly contradicted the January 15 memo he himself authored, the one obtained by the Post, which explicitly prohibited Signal by name.
When reporters pressed Mayor Mamdani on the contradiction, he did not explain it. Instead, he quoted Kassem back at them:
"To quote the chief counsel, there are trainings and there are re-trainings, and that will continue because for us, being in accordance with the record-keeping laws of the city is of paramount importance. I will defer to chief counsel to answer more specifically to your question."
City Hall did not respond to follow-up questions about the gap between the memo and Kassem's public denial. The administration's pattern of withholding information from the public has drawn scrutiny before.
A chief counsel who writes a ban, trains employees on the ban, and then publicly says the ban does not exist is not offering a good-faith account of his own administration's policies. He is offering damage control.
The City Council convened an oversight hearing on the influencer operation and the Signal communications. Rowland, the director most directly involved in the encrypted chats, was the key staffer invited to face lawmakers. She refused to testify.
Instead, the Mamdani administration sent two officials with no direct involvement in the influencer program: Tascha Van Auken, director of the mayor's office of mass engagement, and Shawnta Smith-Cruz, the city's records commissioner.
Van Auken told council members her team does not use Signal. But when Minority Leader David Carr, a Staten Island Republican, pressed her on City Hall's spending on social media campaigns, she repeatedly answered, "I do not have that." The administration's earlier use of encrypted channels to run its influencer operation had already raised questions about whether the arrangement complied with city records laws.
Smith-Cruz, the records commissioner, offered a careful bureaucratic framing. She said the Department of Records and Information Services discourages city staffers from creating "substantive" instant messages that cannot be archived. When asked who decides what counts as substantive, she put the burden elsewhere:
"It is the responsibility of the agency to understand what substantive messages are."
That answer satisfied no one. If each agency decides for itself which messages matter enough to preserve, then an agency that wants to hide its communications can simply decide none of them are substantive.
Carr did not hide his frustration. He told the hearing room the administration's decision to send officials who could not speak to the core issue was a deliberate dodge:
"It's incredibly disappointing and outright ridiculous that we're having a hearing on a very important topic, a topic that was clearly defined, and no one who was able to talk about the meat and potatoes of this issue from the perspective of the administration or the mayor's office is here today to do so."
He was not alone in that view. Councilwoman Gale Brewer, a Manhattan Democrat, also pressed on the disconnect. After Van Auken said her team does not use Signal, Brewer pointed out the obvious problem:
"Just so you know, it's my understanding that that memo did go out to everybody, so it's kind of strange that we're all using Signal for communications."
When a Democratic council member from Manhattan finds the administration's conduct "kind of strange," the problem is bipartisan. The Mamdani administration has faced scrutiny from multiple directions over questions about transparency and governance.
City Council members are now pushing legislation that would require disclosure of city-funded social media content. The bills represent a direct response to the influencer operation, though their exact provisions and current status remain unclear from available reporting.
Several basic questions remain unanswered. Were the roughly 200 influencers paid, and if so, with what funds? How were they selected? What content did they produce? What city resources supported the operation? None of these questions were answered at the hearing, in part because the one official who could have addressed them, Rowland, refused to appear.
The auto-delete settings on the Signal chats raise a separate concern. New York's records laws require preservation of government communications. If the messages were substantive, and coordinating a 200-person messaging operation on behalf of the mayor's office would seem to qualify, then deleting them may have violated those preservation requirements. Whether any recovery of the deleted chats is possible remains unknown.
Mamdani's tenure has already drawn fire over gaps between his public commitments and his administration's conduct. The Signal episode fits that pattern: a written policy existed, a training was held, and the staff did the opposite, on an app designed to leave no trace.
The sequence of events is straightforward. The chief counsel banned Signal for city work. Staff ignored the ban. The conversations were auto-deleted. The chief counsel then publicly denied the ban existed. The mayor deferred all questions to the chief counsel. The key staffer refused to testify. And the officials who did show up could not, or would not, answer basic questions about spending.
Every step in that chain moved in the same direction: away from accountability and toward opacity. That is not a communications glitch. It is a governance choice.
New Yorkers fund City Hall. They have a right to know what their government is doing, who it is paying, and what it is saying on their behalf. An administration that bans an app, uses it anyway, deletes the evidence, denies the ban, and then ducks the hearing is not acting like a government that believes the public has any such right.
Accountability does not auto-delete. Sooner or later, someone has to answer the question.
