A messaging ban meant to protect New York City’s public records collapsed under scrutiny this week, after reporting revealed Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s own staff broke the rule they had just been trained to follow.
Nearly 200 social media influencers formed the backbone of a coordinated push to generate favorable content about the mayor, according to the New York Post.
That network operated through Signal, the same encrypted app City Hall had explicitly barred employees from using for official business.
Records show the prohibition began in January, when Mamdani’s Chief Counsel Ramzi Kassem sent a memo to communications staff laying out the rule in plain terms.
“You should not use WhatsApp, Signal, or any other communications app or platform for work,” the memo stated.
Kassem’s memo left no ambiguity about how to handle confusion, instructing staff, “If you have questions about the use of other platforms, please contact the Office of the Chief Counsel.”
City Hall did not stop at a written directive. A dedicated training session followed in early March to walk employees through the policy a second time.
Emilia Rowland, who directs Mamdani’s New Media and Cultural Communications office, used Signal anyway, working alongside members of her own team.
Their target audience was not the general public but supporters who had already rallied behind Mamdani’s mayoral campaign.
Scrutiny of Signal use inside government has grown sharply since a leak exposed a Trump administration group chat in an episode nicknamed “Signalgate.”
In that earlier case, then-National Security Adviser Mike Waltz mistakenly added Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal thread.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other officials in that chat had been discussing planned military strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen.
Once journalists began asking questions about Mamdani’s influencer chats, Kassem’s account of the policy shifted dramatically.
“There is no City policy against using Signal,” he said in a new statement, contradicting the memo he had authored months earlier.
Kassem also addressed why the chat couldn’t be reviewed after the fact, saying, “The conversation is not inaccessible to the public because the settings were set to auto-delete until reporters started reaching out about it.”
City Council members arrived at a Tuesday hearing prepared to press Mamdani’s staff directly about the Signal communications.
Instead, the mayor’s office limited its representation to two officials who had no connection to the chats in question.
Those officials were Tascha Van Auken, head of the mayor’s office of mass engagement, and Records Commissioner Shawnta Smith-Cruz.
Neither Rowland nor anyone from her team appeared before the council to answer questions about the influencer outreach.
Reporters pressed Mamdani directly on Tuesday about the gap between Kassem’s January memo and his later public denial of any such policy.
Rather than address the contradiction himself, the mayor deferred entirely to his legal counsel’s office.
“To quote the chief counsel, there are trainings and there are re-trainings, and that will continue because for us, being in accordance with the record-keeping laws of the city is of paramount importance,” Mamdani said.
He closed his answer by repeating the deferral: “I will defer to chief counsel to answer more specifically to your question.”
The auto-delete function on the Signal chat means investigators and the public may never see the full record of what was discussed with the influencer network.
New York’s record-keeping statutes are designed to ensure government communications remain available for public review and accountability.
Whether the deleted Signal messages fell under those requirements remains an open question that City Council has not yet resolved.
No disciplinary measures against Rowland or her staff have been announced by the mayor’s office as of this report.
The size of the influencer operation, nearly 200 participants, marks one of the larger coordinated social media efforts documented at the city level.
City Hall has not indicated whether the Signal ban will be enforced differently going forward or whether further training sessions are planned.
