Mayor Zohran Mamdani is continuing to defend his administration amid concerns about how City Hall interacts with social media influencers.
“City Hall has never paid a content creator or influencer for an interview or engagement with myself,” he said on Friday.
A recent report in the Columbia Journalism Review revealed that the administration maintains a 200-person group chat with social media influencers on the messaging application Signal. Later reporting by the New York Times revealed that one staffer was deleting messages in the chat group in violation of a city records law.
“When we learned about this incident from reporting, we took immediate corrective action. And of course, we will continue with our practice of training with our staff to be in compliance with city rules and regulations,” Ramzi Kassem, chief counsel to the mayor, said.
“The corrective actions that we took included reminding staff to disable disappearing messages,” he added.
Despite fixing the issue, good government groups are still troubled by the revelations.
“We’re in the ninth month of the Mamdani administration, and there’s somebody just being told what the law requires. That’s unacceptable. They need to tighten it up,” said Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York.
Lerner said the issue isn’t the use of the Signal app nor the social media influencers, but that City Hall staffers aren’t following the law. She added that City Hall should publish the list of 200 influencers.
“We’re not trying to hamstring the administration. We’re not telling them don’t use contemporary modalities. What we’re saying is that when you use that, make sure it’s in compliance with the law because the law is old and new and applies no matter what,” Lerner said.
She added there is currently a bill at the state level looking to impose disclosure requirements on social media videos paid for by campaigns.
Mamdani isn’t the first to use Signal; both Mayors Eric Adams and Bill de Blasio used the application during their tenures. And his office isn’t the only one pushing out messages using influencers.
The city’s hospital system and the Campaign Finance Board have paid content creators to produce videos. They disclosed the information in the videos, a policy some, like Rachael Fauss from Reinvent Albany, said should be expanded.
“It’s already there for some agencies; it should be citywide so that New Yorkers are viewing those messages. It’s just basic information that the public should have,” she said.
Earlier, the mayor’s legal counsel, Kassem, defended the use of Signal, which not only deletes messages but encrypts them.
“For an application like Signal large group management, other useful features may be helpful for a particular team at City Hall, and so we would authorize it but specify that you have to disable disappearing messages to remain in compliance,” he said.