New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's administration is funneling daily talking points and video clips to roughly 200 social media influencers through an encrypted Signal group chat, a setup that open-government watchdogs say may violate the city's own record-keeping laws.

The Signal group, called "NYC Creators Announcements," operates out of City Hall under the direction of Emilia Rowland, the city's Director of New Media and Cultural Communications, who earns $175,000 a year. Rowland and her staff push out daily updates, pre-packaged clips, and messaging guides that influencers then use to promote municipal programs on topics ranging from voting and healthcare to immigration, tenants' rights, and composting, Fox News Digital reported.

The group did not spring from nowhere. It evolved directly from Creators4Zohran, a campaign support network built during Mamdani's successful 2025 mayoral race, the one that made him the first socialist mayor of the nation's most populous city. Once Mamdani took office on January 1, 2026, the campaign apparatus was quietly repurposed into a taxpayer-adjacent government communications channel.

That transition is where the legal questions begin.

Signal's disappearing messages could put City Hall on the wrong side of the law

Signal's encryption is the point of the app. Messages can be set to auto-delete, leaving no retrievable record. But New York City's charter requires officials to preserve instant messages about city decisions, actions, or policies, even those sent on personal devices or third-party platforms. The Mamdani administration has not said publicly whether the disappearing-messages feature is active in the influencer group.

Axel Ebermann of the New York Coalition for Open Government put the issue plainly. As the New York Post reported, Ebermann said:

"Government records do not stop being government records because an official uses Signal, a personal phone, or another non-government platform."

That is not an abstract concern. If Rowland's team is directing influencers on how to frame city policy, and those messages vanish, the public loses any ability to review what its own government communicated, to whom, and why. Freedom of Information requests become meaningless if the records no longer exist by the time anyone asks for them.

The mayor, pressed by reporters on the matter, offered careful language but no specifics. He said his administration "will always strive to fully comply with all legal requirements, including those that relate to the preservation of city records." He added that if "any departures from what is legally required" are found, his team would "look into it immediately and take corrective action."

"Strive to comply" is not the same as "we are complying." And the mayor did not say whether his office had actually reviewed the Signal group's settings or retention practices before reporters started asking questions.

Influencers pocket $5,000 to $20,000 per campaign, but the public can't find out who

The influencers in the Signal group are not paid directly by the city for participating or for their social media coverage. But some of them receive payments from marketing and advertising firms that hold contracts with city agencies. City employees told Columbia Journalism Review researchers that those payments range from $5,000 to $20,000 per campaign.

The CJR investigation, published by its Tow Center, found that despite taxpayer money flowing through these arrangements, the identities of paid influencers are closely guarded. As the Washington Examiner noted, influencer names were concealed in procurement notices, making it impossible for the public to distinguish between an organic supporter and a paid promoter.

Grace Rauh, executive director of Citizens Union, a good-government group, summed up the transparency gap. "We don't know who is getting paid and who isn't, and the public has no way to tell a paid supporter from an organic voice," Rauh said. "There needs to be disclosure, and we need clear rules of the road."

That distinction matters. When a New Yorker scrolls past a cheerful video about the city's composting program or a post praising a new healthcare initiative, there is no label telling them the creator received thousands of dollars in taxpayer-funded payments routed through a contractor. The arrangement functions like government-funded advertising without the disclosure requirements that normally attach to it.

Mamdani's administration has already drawn scrutiny for its handling of other policy rollouts. The mayor refused to send officials to face the City Council over a botched pied-à-terre tax implementation earlier this year, a pattern of ducking accountability that the influencer arrangement fits neatly alongside.

Influencer-only briefings bypass the press corps entirely

The Signal group is not the only special access the administration provides. Just The News reported that the mayor's office hosts influencer-only press briefings, separate from the sessions open to credentialed journalists. The influencers receive the same pre-packaged clips and messaging that flow through the Signal chat, material designed to be shared, not scrutinized.

Mamdani defended the approach in broad terms. "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," he said, "whether that means to all of you, to TV, to radio, to social media, to content creators and so on and so forth."

That framing treats influencers as just another media channel. But traditional reporters operate under editorial standards, ask adversarial questions, and are not paid by the government or its contractors. Influencers in this network face none of those constraints. They receive talking points from City Hall, some collect taxpayer-funded checks, and their audiences have no way to know it.

The arrangement also raises a question the administration has not answered: what editorial discretion, if any, do the influencers have? If Rowland's office sends a daily message saying "promote this program" and attaches a ready-made video clip, the line between independent content creation and government propaganda gets thin fast.

Fox News Digital reached out to City Hall for comment on the arrangement. The administration did not respond before publication.

Mamdani's credibility on transparency was already shaky. He reversed a major campaign pledge after taking office, and his public appearances have not always gone smoothly, a Staten Island crowd booed him off stage at an NYPD event in under a minute.

Signal's shadow over government accountability is growing

The use of Signal by government officials is not new, and it is not limited to City Hall. The app made national headlines when 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 the platform's encryption and disappearing-message features at the center of a national debate about official communications and public accountability.

Mamdani's use of Signal is different in kind, nobody is alleging classified information was shared with influencers, but the underlying problem is the same. When government officials conduct public business on platforms designed to leave no trace, the public's right to know what its government is doing erodes. Record-keeping laws exist precisely because officials have always been tempted to communicate off the books. Encrypted messaging apps make that temptation easier to act on than ever before.

No formal legal complaint or investigation has been announced. But the open questions are significant. Is the disappearing-messages feature turned on? Which influencers have received payments, and from which firms? Are those firms required to disclose the payments as government-funded communications? Does the administration have any written policy governing what can and cannot be shared through the group?

None of those questions have public answers yet. The mayor's promise to "look into" any problems is not a substitute for the transparency that should have been in place before the first message was sent.

A government that pays people to say nice things about it and then destroys the records is not communicating with the public. It is managing the public, and hoping nobody checks the receipts.