Mayor Zohran Mamdani's City Hall used an encrypted group chat to feed talking points to nearly 200 social media influencers, and now the City Council wants answers.

The City Council's Committee on Governmental Operations, State & Federal Legislation scheduled a September 22 hearing to examine how the Mamdani administration built and maintained a covert messaging pipeline with 189 social media creators, the New York Post reported. Committee Chair Gale Brewer, a Manhattan lawmaker, set the hearing after a Columbia Journalism Review investigation exposed the arrangement.

The CJR report, published by its Tow Center, revealed that City Hall officials ran a Signal group chat called "NYC Creators Announcements." Through that channel, staffers sent daily updates, talking points, and video clips that influencers could fold into their own social media posts. Some of those influencers were paid through contracts with city agencies for work on specific messaging campaigns. Others participated for free, telling CJR they supported Mamdani's cause and that the arrangement helped grow their follower counts.

Campaign roots run straight into City Hall

The influencer network did not materialize after Mamdani took office. It grew directly out of a campaign operation called "Creators4Zohran," a group convened during his mayoral race. Once Mamdani won, the network migrated into official city communications, same people, new purpose, taxpayer money now in the mix.

That transition from campaign apparatus to government messaging tool is exactly what has Council members asking hard questions. The administration chose Signal, an encrypted, disappearing-message app, rather than a standard, archivable government communication channel. Whether the chat was set to auto-delete messages remains unknown, but if it was, city record-keeping laws could be at stake.

City Hall has refused to make public the list of influencers or disclose what contracts they received. That wall of secrecy prompted Queens Councilman Phil Wong to begin drafting legislation that would force transparency onto the entire operation.

Wong's bill, still being finalized, would require influencers working on messaging campaigns with city agencies to clearly label their posts and videos as "Paid for by NYC" or something equivalent. A separate provision would target a specific loophole: digital creators hired as subcontractors rather than direct contractors, a structure that can bury payments far from public view.

Wong: 'Tax dollars going to grifting influencers from out of state'

Wong did not hold back about the arrangement. In a statement, he told reporters:

"New Yorkers don't want their tax dollars going to grifting influencers from out of state who are paid to tell us everything here is great when we know d*** well it isn't."

He pressed the point further, questioning why the city needed to pay outsiders at all.

"If City Hall has to pay people who don't even live here to sell New Yorkers on how wonderful New York is, that tells you everything you need to know."

Wong's comments raise a straightforward question that the Mamdani administration has so far declined to answer: how many of the 189 influencers actually live in New York City, and how many are collecting city funds from other states? The administration has not responded publicly to the CJR report or to the announced hearing.

The mayor's broader record of resisting outside scrutiny is well established. His pied-à-terre tax faced court challenges from homeowners who argued the policy overstepped legal bounds, and his administration has drawn pushback on multiple fronts.

Council insiders compare Mamdani's secrecy to Adams-era standards

Behind the scenes, frustration runs deeper than the public statements suggest. An unnamed Council insider drew a pointed comparison to Mamdani's predecessor, Eric Adams, telling reporters:

"If Eric Adams did this, he would have his head handed to him on a platter."

The same insider questioned why the administration chose encrypted communications in the first place:

"Why is everything so secretive? If it was really above board, they wouldn't be using Signal; they would make the contracts public, and not have the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) all saying that there doesn't need to be any oversight."

That reference to the Democratic Socialists of America, the political organization that helped launch Mamdani's career, adds another dimension. According to the insider, DSA-aligned voices have pushed back against the idea that the influencer program needs any oversight at all. For a mayor who rode a democratic-socialist platform into City Hall, the resistance to transparency fits a pattern his critics have identified across multiple policy fights.

Mamdani's administration has also clashed with federal authorities over tax policy and faced legal action from city grocers challenging his municipal supermarket plan, a record that suggests accountability is something imposed on this administration, not something it volunteers.

Encrypted apps and subcontractors: a transparency problem by design

Two structural choices stand out in the CJR findings. First, the use of Signal. Government agencies across the country have faced scrutiny for conducting public business on encrypted platforms that can erase records. Federal and state open-records laws generally require that official communications be preserved and made available to the public. Whether New York City's record-keeping statutes apply to this particular chat depends on how the messages were classified and whether auto-delete was enabled, details the administration has not disclosed.

Second, the subcontractor arrangement. By routing payments to influencers through subcontracts rather than direct city contracts, the administration may have placed those expenditures outside the normal disclosure requirements that apply to vendors doing business with the city. Wong's bill specifically targets this structure, aiming to pull those buried payments into public view.

Together, the encrypted channel and the subcontractor pipeline create a system that is difficult to audit, difficult to track, and, unless the Council acts, difficult to hold accountable. The lawsuits filed by New York City grocers against another Mamdani initiative suggest the mayor's appetite for ambitious programs routinely outpaces his willingness to operate in the open.

Mamdani is already navigating political friction on other fronts. Retired police officers have demanded that both Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul skip the upcoming 9/11 ceremony, a sign that the mayor's standing with law enforcement and first responders remains strained. Mamdani declared September 11 an official "Day of Remembrance and Service," but the gesture did not quiet the criticism.

The Council hearing on September 22 will test whether Brewer's committee can extract the information City Hall has refused to release voluntarily: the full list of influencers, the dollar amounts involved, which agencies signed the contracts, and whether any messages were destroyed. Wong's bill, if it advances, would impose ongoing disclosure requirements that the administration cannot simply ignore.

The Mamdani administration has shown no shortage of confidence when demanding money from Washington. Explaining how it spent taxpayer dollars on a secret influencer army at home should not be harder than asking for federal funds, unless the answers are worse than the questions.