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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has created an army of social-media influencers to help boost his administration, a recent exposé in the Columbia Journalism Review reveals. But while the mayor’s unorthodox media strategy has gotten scrutiny, not enough attention has been paid to the influencers themselves and their views.

Some in the mayor’s coterie are relatively innocuous. But others celebrate the assassination of Charlie Kirk, claim America runs “mass concentration camps,” and make apologies for terrorist attacks targeting synagogues.

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These influencers can hardly be said to represent New Yorkers. Hundreds of posts from those identified as belonging to the group chat of the Mamdani administration media team have been devoted to police and prison abolition, dismantling Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and lambasting Israel. The content belies the mayor’s polished image as a moderate and offers more evidence that his social and professional circles are more radical than he lets on.

Mamdani has embraced influencer communications since taking office 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 hosted during his first week in office.

Joining Mamdani’s influencer brigade is easy, the CJR reported. After filling out an intake form, influencers receive “daily updates, talking points, and clips” through the “NYC Creators Announcements” group chat on the encrypted-messaging platform Signal. The initiative is led by Emilia Rowland, who serves as the mayor’s director of New Media and Cultural Communications.

Until two weeks ago, posts on that chat were set to auto-delete, in apparent violation of state record-keeping rules. Pro-Mamdani posters have found themselves scoring interviews with the mayor and, more significantly, positioning themselves to secure paid sponsorships promoting the work of government agencies.

In a statement to City Journal, Rowland said that “the Mayor’s office has never paid a content creator or influencer, full stop.” She added that “We engage 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.”

City Hall has not published a complete list of the influencers included in the Signal chat. But my analysis of the 33 who could be identified found 18 on the Left or far Left, with an additional 15 posting primarily nonpolitical and occasionally political content.

For some of the influencers welcomed into the group chat, radical rhetoric is common. Framing the Israel-Hamas war as a “genocide,” presenting the police as racial oppressors, and suggesting that ICE is a “tool of fascism” are just some of the themes shared between members of the group chat and the Mamdani administration. Prominent far-left figures include Christina Brown. Brown, who goes by @missxtinab on Instagram, celebrated the assassination of Charlie Kirk (“violence was an answer”), suggested that ICE agents should be poisoned, and told her 282,000 followers, “I don’t love this country. I hate it so much. I want to see it fall.”

She has described Christianity as a “religion of white supremacy” whose pastors are “COVERED in the blood of enslaved people.” Brown does not mince words, for example, in denying that the phrase “globalize the intifada” is anti-Semitic. And she’s similarly blunt when she seems to endorse violence: “Violence wasn’t the answer . . . what do you mean? Violence was the equation.”

Megan Klink, who co-runs @prettyinformedgirls, told her 223,000 followers, “America has mass concentration camps” and “there is no reforming a f***ing Gestapo,” referring to ICE.

Cassie Willson, who has posted several videos with the mayor, exemplified the worldview of many of these influencers in a video she made in February: “Free Palestine, [f*ck] Donald Trump . . . billionaires shouldn’t exist, [f*ck] fascism . . . no war but class war.” Many extreme viewpoints are intentionally disguised as comedy to blur the lines. “You’ve got to unalive” — that is, kill — “your girlfriend” for working for ICE, a character says in one satirical video that Willson made in collaboration with Prance (a.k.a. @bocxtop), another of Mamdani’s influencers.

An earlier post by Prance, from an influencer conference the mayor hosted during his campaign, highlights the unseriousness of such coverage: “In your time as mayor, are you planning to provide bisexual girlfriends to everyone in New York City?” he asked.

Matt Bernstein is a self-described “queer jew with long nails” and another of Mamdani’s influencers. Though he has not publicly disclosed his membership in the chat, Bernstein was granted interviews with the mayor on multiple occasions. When he is not posting about the need to be “radically pro-transgender,” he is making videos like this one, where he says that “Israel is the only safe space for queer people in the Middle East . . . because they bomb all the other ones.” Bernstein, who has more than 2.4 million followers on Instagram, blocked New York traffic “in protest of our senators continuing to fund Israel’s genocide” and explained the Hezbollah-inspired attack on a Michigan synagogue by saying that “violence begets violence.”

Online influencers play an increasingly important role in American politics. Pew Research reported that 38% of 18–34-year-olds, and 21% overall, regularly get news from these sources, which they often see as more authentic. Political and public-relations campaigns have responded by increasing their use of influencers, sometimes disclosing these relationships but often not.

“It’s so widespread,” said Kaitlyn Hennessy, a content creator using her own Instagram account to underscore the prevalence of undisclosed paid political content. Hennessy previously revealed that California billionaire Tom Steyer had spent close to $1 million on influencers and related services in his California gubernatorial campaign.

Candidates often hire media consulting firms — like Fight Agency, which was retained by Mamdani — who in turn identify and contract with influencers. The content turned out by these influencers ranges from positive coverage of candidates to public ambushes of their opponents. “Some of this stuff where you’re seeing people get ambushed [on Instagram] is paid . . . And the people who are doing it, you don’t even know if they actually care,” Hennessy told City Journal.

“Where it gets murky,” she said, is that influencers will claim, “‘we were only paid for certain posts.’ But you weren’t going to be able to make anti-Tom Steyer posts, then get paid [after that].” Influencers whose messaging diverges from that of a candidate or politician can see future opportunities for sponsorship dry up. Hennessy said that her membership in Creator Congress, a progressive influencer network, was terminated in August. She was told in an email, which I reviewed, that this was in part because of her “defense of pro-Israel candidate [Jack Schlossberg],” after she pointed out the documented use of paid content by his opponent in the NY-12 primary, Alex Bores.

The Mamdani administration has already admitted that the use of auto-deleting messages on the Signal chat, reported by the New York Times, violated a New York State law requiring the preservation of official records. The city council has scheduled a September 22 oversight meeting on the matter, during which a council member will introduce legislation. A framework outlining clear criteria for the inclusion (and exclusion) of individuals from privileged communications will go a long way toward ensuring that media — new and old — are not excluded simply for asking unwanted questions about trade-offs and implementation.

Social-media influencers are likely here to stay in American politics. Both the Mamdani administration and New York City will be better off if we can, through both policy and law, more clearly define their roles.

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This is republished with permission from the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. The original can be found here.

Adam Lehodey is an investigative reporter at City Journal.

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The Radical Threat Of Mamdani’s Unvetted Influencer Army