New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration has built an unusual communications pipeline: a Signal group chat called “NYC Creators Announcements” that feeds daily talking points, clips, and updates to a roster of social-media influencers. Now that arrangement is drawing scrutiny on two fronts — the views of some creators involved, and the administration’s admitted failure to preserve the messages under state record-keeping law.
Writing for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, investigative reporter Adam Lehodey analyzed 33 influencers who could be identified from the group chat and found that 18 post primarily left or far-left political content, while the remaining 15 post mainly nonpolitical material with occasional political commentary. City Hall has not published a complete list of participants.
Radical Posts Draw Attention
Among the most prominent figures identified is Christina Brown, who posts as @missxtinab on Instagram to roughly 282,000 followers. According to Lehodey, Brown celebrated the assassination of Charlie Kirk, suggested ICE agents should be poisoned, and wrote, “I don’t love this country. I hate it so much. I want to see it fall.” She has also called Christianity “a religion of white supremacy” and denied that “globalize the intifada” is an anti-Semitic phrase.
Megan Klink, who co-runs the account @prettyinformedgirls with about 223,000 followers, described America as having “mass concentration camps” and said ICE cannot be reformed. Cassie Willson, who has appeared in videos with the mayor, declared in a February video: “Free Palestine, [f*ck] Donald Trump … billionaires shouldn’t exist, [f*ck] fascism … no war but class war.” A satirical video she made with another Mamdani influencer, Prance, includes a character saying someone should kill their girlfriend for working for ICE.
Matt Bernstein, a self-described “queer jew with long nails” with more than 2.4 million Instagram followers, has been granted interviews with the mayor on multiple occasions. He has posted that Israel is “the only safe space for queer people in the Middle East … because they bomb all the other ones,” blocked New York traffic in a protest over Senate funding for Israel, and characterized the Hezbollah-inspired attack on a Michigan synagogue by saying “violence begets violence.”
The chat’s content — much of it devoted to police and prison abolition, dismantling ICE, and criticism of Israel — contrasts with the mayor’s more moderate public image, Lehodey argues, and suggests his circles are more radical than he lets on.
How the Program Works
Mamdani embraced influencer outreach from the start of his term in January. “We need to speak to New Yorkers through every single medium that they see themselves and see the world around them, and all of you are such critical parts of that,” he said at an influencer-only summit during his first week in office. The program is led by Emilia Rowland, the mayor’s director of New Media and Cultural Communications.
Joining is straightforward, according to the Columbia Journalism Review, which first reported on the initiative and was cited by Lehodey. After completing an intake form, influencers receive daily updates and clips through the Signal chat. Pro-Mamdani posters have landed interviews with the mayor and positioned themselves for paid sponsorships promoting government agency work.
Rowland told City Journal that “the Mayor’s office has never paid a content creator or influencer, full stop,” adding that the administration engages “broadly and in good faith, including with people who may disagree with the administration or have made comments the administration disagrees with — just as we allow outlets with a variety of partisan slants access to cover the mayor.”
Until two weeks ago, posts in the chat were set to auto-delete, a practice the administration has acknowledged violates a New York State law requiring preservation of official records. The New York Times reported on the disappearing messages, and the City Council has scheduled a September 22 oversight meeting, where a member will introduce legislation on the matter.
A Wider Practice, and a Murky One
The arrangement fits a broader trend. Pew Research has found that 38% of Americans aged 18–34 and 21% overall regularly get news from influencers, whom audiences often view as more authentic than traditional outlets. Campaigns have responded by hiring influencers directly or through consulting firms; Mamdani retained Fight Agency, which identifies and contracts with creators.
Kaitlyn Hennessy, a content creator who has documented undisclosed paid political content — including nearly $1 million spent by California billionaire Tom Steyer in his gubernatorial campaign — told City Journal that the lines are often blurred. She described influencers who claim they were “only paid for certain posts,” while noting that creators whose messaging diverges from a candidate’s can see future sponsorship opportunities vanish. Hennessy said her membership in the progressive network Creator Congress was terminated in August, partly, she was told in an email Lehodey reviewed, because of her “defense of pro-Israel candidate [Jack Schlossberg]” after she highlighted paid content by his opponent in the NY-12 primary, Alex Bores.
Some in Mamdani’s circle of influencers are relatively innocuous, Lehodey writes. But the mix of radical rhetoric, undisclosed sponsorship dynamics, and deleted government records has put the program under a spotlight that shows no sign of dimming. Lehodey argues that a clear framework for who gets access to privileged communications — and who is excluded — would help ensure that media of all kinds are not shut out for asking unwelcome questions.
The piece was republished with permission from the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-radical-threat-of-mamdanis-unvetted-influencer-army