Mayor Zohran Mamdani's hand-picked network of social media influencers rushed to defend his administration after a Columbia Journalism Review investigation exposed their coordination, and in doing so, confirmed exactly how the operation works.
Within hours of the CJR report landing and the New York Post splashing the story on its front page, at least five progressive content creators with a combined audience of nearly two million followers took to Instagram, not to deny their role in the mayor's messaging machine, but to celebrate it. One by one, they laid out how City Hall feeds them policy information, video clips, and event access through an encrypted Signal group chat called "NYC Creators Announcements," which includes roughly 200 influencers.
The admissions gave the public its clearest look yet at a taxpayer-funded influence operation that blurs the line between government communication and political propaganda, and that now faces a City Council oversight hearing scheduled for September 22.
Lisa Chin Mollica, a 48-year-old Brooklynite who runs the progressive, anti-Trump Instagram account "Vote In Or Out" for 1.1 million followers, posted a detailed account of her relationship with the Mamdani administration. She described direct, frequent contact with City Hall's media team, not just through the group chat, but sometimes by personal text.
"I genuinely do not know how such a small team manages to communicate with so many of us. It is a constant stream of information, events, policies."
Mollica said she has never been paid by the Mamdani team and insisted she was "genuinely happy" to amplify the administration's messaging. Her account bio claims to post "news" alongside other "perspectives," and she says she created a non-partisan, fact-checked voter guide during the 2020 election. But the content she circulates now, clips of Mamdani at press conferences, policy announcements, anti-Trump and anti-ICE messaging, arrives courtesy of the same City Hall pipeline she openly praised.
At least one of her own followers saw the contradiction. An unnamed commenter replied: "You might not work for Mamdani, but the bias is very much real."
Cassie Willson, an Instagram influencer with 314,000 followers, took a different approach: she posted a screenshot of a fake-looking check for $10,000 she said she received from the Mamdani campaign, framing it as a joke.
"If they had actually done their research, they would have found this very real check that I have in my New York City apartment that I got from the Mamdani campaign."
The quip was meant to mock reporters. But Willson then confirmed the substance of the story she was trying to dismiss. She praised the administration's creator outreach in plain terms.
"Since becoming mayor, Mamdani's team has done an amazing job of connecting with a bunch of New York City-based creators to tell us about stuff that's going on in the administration like when they roll out new policies or programs. A program or policy is only as good as the number of people who know about it, right?"
Willson had previously posted content that tracked closely with City Hall's preferred narrative. After Mamdani drew criticism for publishing an immigrant enclave map that left Little Italy off the list, she posted a video poking fun at an Italian festival in Williamsburg for serving empanadas and funnel cakes, mocking the authenticity of the neighborhood's Italian identity. Whether City Hall fed her that angle remains unclear. The Post noted it could not determine if Willson received talking points for that post.
The mayor has faced a steady stream of controversies beyond the influencer operation. An ethics complaint recently accused Mamdani of using city resources to boost Democratic candidates, raising similar questions about the boundary between government work and political activity.
Ariana Afshar, a 30-year-old influencer with 433,000 Instagram followers whose LinkedIn lists her residence as the Bay Area in California, posted her own defense on Thursday.
"I just cover the news and anything I say is because I genuinely love Mamdani's administration."
That a California-based content creator describes herself as a news source while simultaneously professing love for a New York City mayor's administration, an administration that supplies her with material through a private chat, captures the arrangement's fundamental problem. These influencers present themselves to followers as independent voices. They are, by their own admission, distribution channels for City Hall.
Mamdani's tenure has created friction on multiple fronts. He drew sharp backlash for publicly mourning a Rikers Island inmate charged in a meat-cleaver killing, a move that alienated many New Yorkers who expect their mayor to stand with victims, not with the accused.
Miral Sattar, a 47-year-old publishing entrepreneur who runs the book-focused Instagram account @miralreads for more than 28,000 followers, offered a more candid description of the back-and-forth between influencers and the administration.
"Sometimes I ask them for clips because I saw something I want to cover."
Sattar framed her participation as organic, noting she supported Mamdani long before he held office.
"I was posting about Zohran before he was mayor. My kids and I canvassed for him when he was polling at basically 1%."
She said administration officials do not dictate what she posts. But the dynamic she described, a political supporter who canvassed for a candidate, now receiving government-produced clips to share with her audience, is not independent media. It is an extension of a campaign apparatus that never stopped running.
Megan Klink, 28, who hosts the progressive-policy podcast "Pretty Informed Girls," delivered the most unguarded assessment of the arrangement in an Instagram rant on Thursday.
"The people that work in the mayor's office are incredibly f***ing good at their jobs. They have created this wonderful ecosystem of influencers and creators and all sorts of people who are able to get out information that legacy media won't cover."
Klink accused traditional news outlets of lying and specifically claimed they failed to cover warming centers during a winter cold front in which several New Yorkers froze to death. The Post noted that it and multiple other news organizations did, in fact, cover warming centers during that period.
The pattern is familiar: dismiss the press as dishonest, then justify a government-run messaging pipeline as the corrective. Klink's own words, praising an "ecosystem" built by the mayor's office, describe a PR operation, not journalism.
Mamdani has also faced legal challenges from unexpected quarters. Immigrant bodega owners sued the mayor over a government-run grocery store plan they say threatens their livelihoods, adding to a list of constituencies that have clashed with his administration.
The Columbia Journalism Review investigation that triggered the influencer defense effort revealed that the Signal group chat did not emerge from nowhere. Fox News reported the network evolved directly from "Creators4Zohran," a pro-Mamdani campaign organization, meaning the infrastructure built to elect him was repurposed to promote his government.
CJR researchers found that some influencers had been paid by city agencies for outreach campaigns, though the review had "little detail on the contracts." The Washington Examiner reported that payments ranged from $5,000 to $20,000 per campaign, routed through marketing agencies in a way that obscured the influencers' identities in procurement records. The administration's Director of New Media, Emilia Rowland, who earns $175,000 a year, organized the Signal chat and distributed information to creators.
The CJR report also noted that "despite the fact that taxpayer money is being spent on campaigns involving influencers, information about these relationships is closely guarded." Mamdani's team did not answer the review's questions beyond defending its use of Signal as a communication tool.
Signal's disappearing-messages feature compounds the transparency problem. City record-keeping laws require the preservation of government communications, and Just The News reported that the platform's auto-delete capability raises questions about whether those laws are being violated. Mamdani offered a carefully hedged response: "My administration will always strive to fully comply with all legal requirements, including those that relate to the preservation of city records. If there are any departures from what is legally required, my administration will look into it immediately and take corrective action."
"Will strive to comply" is not the same as "has complied." And pledging to investigate future departures sidesteps the question of whether past communications have already vanished.
The New York City Council has scheduled an oversight hearing for September 22 to examine the administration's use of influencers and encrypted messaging. The hearing will give council members their first formal opportunity to press Mamdani's team on the scope of the operation, the contracts behind it, and whether disappearing messages have destroyed public records.
On Thursday, the administration ignored media inquiries about whether it had activated the Signal network specifically to coordinate the influencer counteroffensive against the CJR report and the Post's front-page coverage. The synchronized timing of the influencer posts, multiple creators posting defenses on the same day, using similar themes, speaks for itself.
The mayor's credibility problems extend well beyond the influencer operation. He has been sued by the city's teachers union over a paraprofessional pay bonus he once championed but later reversed, and a rabbi's daughter accused him of fueling antisemitism in New York City, controversies that have eroded trust across constituencies that once supported him.
Meanwhile, the influencers kept posting. On September 2, Mollica's account shared a clip of Mamdani at a press conference announcing a moratorium on generative artificial intelligence for city students, captioned: "New York City introduces its first comprehensive AI policy for public schools." The post looked like news. It arrived through a government pipeline.
When the people paid to inform the public are taking their cues from the people they are supposed to hold accountable, the public is the last to know, and the first to pay.