New York City's self-described socialist mayor built a private, encrypted chat network to feed talking points to hundreds of social media influencers, raising pointed questions about whether his administration is skirting the city's own record-keeping laws.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani's City Hall operates a Signal group chat called "NYC Creators Announcements" that pushes daily updates, talking points, and video clips to roughly 200 social media content creators, Fox News Digital reported. The influencers then promote municipal programs, voting drives, healthcare, immigration services, tenants' rights, participatory budgeting, even composting, directly to their followers. The group is steered by Emilia Rowland, the city's Director of New Media and Cultural Communications, and her staff.
The arrangement amounts to a taxpayer-adjacent propaganda pipeline run on an app designed to make messages vanish. Signal's disappearing-messages feature can automatically delete conversations after a set period. Whether that feature is turned on in the Mamdani group remains unclear, and that ambiguity sits at the center of the records-law problem.
The Signal group did not start as a government initiative. It grew out of "Creators4Zohran," a campaign support network that backed Mamdani's 2025 mayoral run. Mamdani won that closely watched race, defeating Independent candidate Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa, and took office on January 1, 2026. At some point after the inauguration, the campaign chat migrated into an official City Hall communications channel, though the exact date of that transition has not been disclosed.
That origin story matters. A campaign influencer group carries no public-records obligations. A government communications channel does. The city charter requires preservation of official records, and New York's municipal code, linked but not quoted in available reporting, sets out those obligations in detail. Mamdani's administration has not explained when or how it determined that encrypted, potentially self-deleting messages satisfy those requirements.
The mayor's record on transparency is already under scrutiny. His administration faces an ethics complaint alleging misuse of city resources to boost Democratic candidates, and landlords have accused his office of weaponizing municipal systems against property owners.
A Columbia Journalism Review investigation found that while the influencers are not paid directly by the city for participating in the Signal group or for their general coverage, some do receive payments from marketing and advertising firms that hold contracts with city agencies. City employees told CJR researchers those payments ranged from $5,000 to $20,000 per campaign.
The structure is worth pausing on. The city hires outside firms. Those firms pay the influencers. The influencers post content that promotes city programs, using talking points supplied by City Hall staff through an encrypted chat. The city can claim it does not pay the influencers. The influencers can claim independence. But the money flows from city coffers to contractors to the same people sitting in the mayor's private Signal group, receiving daily marching orders.
Which specific firms hold those contracts, which city agencies awarded them, and whether the influencers disclose their financial relationships to their audiences, none of that has been answered. The CJR report flagged the arrangement; Mamdani's office has not addressed the disclosure question publicly.
The Mamdani administration's spending decisions have drawn fire on other fronts as well. His office greenlit a $75 million grocery contract for a company that owed New York City stores more than $1 million, a deal that raised its own questions about how the administration vets the entities it sends public money to.
Pressed by reporters on Wednesday about whether the Signal operation breaks city law, Mamdani offered carefully lawyered assurances. He told reporters:
"My administration will always strive to fully comply with all legal requirements, including those that relate to the preservation of city records."
He added:
"If there are any departures from what is legally required, my administration will look into it immediately and take corrective action."
Both statements are promises about future behavior, not confirmations of current compliance. Mamdani did not say the administration is preserving records from the Signal chat. He did not say the disappearing-messages feature is disabled. He did not say anyone has reviewed the arrangement for legality. He said the administration will "strive" and will "look into it" if problems surface.
That is a hedge, not an answer.
Mamdani defended the broader concept of communicating through influencers, framing it as meeting residents where they are:
"New Yorkers get their news in a wide variety of ways, and it is our responsibility to ensure that we communicate information from city government directly to the people of the city, whether that means to all of you, to TV, to radio, to social media, to content creators and so on and so forth."
No one disputes that a mayor can talk to the public through social media. The question is whether he can do it through a private encrypted channel that may erase the record of what his staff told 200 message amplifiers to say, and whether funneling contractor payments to those same amplifiers creates an undisclosed pay-for-play arrangement.
The Mamdani operation is not the first time Signal has created headaches for government officials. Then-Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth came under fire after sensitive, real-time details about U.S. military strikes were shared in a Signal group that included a journalist. That episode put a national spotlight on the tension between encrypted messaging and the public's right to know what its government is doing.
Mamdani's use case is different in kind, nobody is sharing classified military intelligence with lifestyle influencers, but the underlying accountability problem is the same. When government business moves onto platforms built to leave no trace, the public loses its ability to verify what officials said, promised, or directed.
New York City's charter exists precisely to prevent that. Record-keeping laws are not bureaucratic busywork. They are the mechanism that lets journalists, watchdogs, and citizens hold officials accountable after the fact. An administration that routes its messaging through a self-destructing chat app is, at minimum, making accountability harder. At worst, it is making it impossible.
Fox News Digital reached out to City Hall for comment and received no response before publication.
Mamdani's governance has generated a growing list of confrontations with the people his policies affect most directly. Immigrant grocers have sued over his city-owned supermarket plan, and homeowners confronted his administration at a heated Council hearing over his pied-à-terre tax rollout. The influencer operation fits a pattern: bold policy ambitions paired with a casual approach to the rules that are supposed to keep government honest.
A mayor who needs 200 paid-adjacent influencers on an encrypted app to sell his agenda to his own city might want to ask why the agenda needs that much selling, and why he is so determined to leave no paper trail while he does it.
