On a Tuesday morning in March, a curious wave of enthusiasm rolled across social media. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani had just canceled a $9 million McKinsey contract, and within hours, comedians, operatives, and parenting influencers were all praising the move in strikingly similar language. It looked like an organic consensus. It was choreography.
The mayor’s director of new media had emailed hundreds of influencers a script contrasting the savings with Eric Adams’s wasteful spending. Some who echoed that language that morning had received the memo. At least one commentator who posted nearly identical praise never did. Good luck telling the two apart, because that’s the point.
I’ve spent 30 years as an expert witness untangling how money moves through structures built to obscure who gets paid. I know a shell game when I see one. New York City Hall built one out of TikTok accounts, and taxpayers are holding the bag.
City Hall has worked with more than 1,200 content creators since Mamdani took office, funneled largely through a private Signal group called NYC Creators Announcements. A Columbia Journalism Review investigation confirmed at least 189 participants tied to the administration, with members and the mayor’s own team putting the real number above 200. They get daily talking points, video clips, and invitations to events that some accredited reporters don’t. It functions like a press list, except press lists don’t come with a taxpayer-funded payroll and an auto-delete button.
That payroll is real, even if nobody at City Hall will say how big it is. Columbia’s researchers found city agencies pay influencers $5,000 to $20,000 dollars per campaign, routed through marketing contractors so the paperwork lists the ad firm, never the creator. Separately, the city’s own Campaign Finance Board paid 18 influencers a combined $626,365 through an outside firm during the 2025 cycle. The mayor’s office declined to give the New York Times a budget figure, a participant list, or a spending total. A self-styled reform administration that won’t publish a receipt is running a black box with excellent branding.
Then there’s New York’s public records law, which doesn’t care what app you use. One Signal channel run by the mayor’s new media director was set to erase her messages automatically, a detail that surfaced only because a New York Times reporter started asking questions. The day after that inquiry, the setting was switched off. Citizens Union’s Grace Rauh noted plainly that disappearing messages used for city business run straight into New York’s records retention rules. That kind of timing has a name in my business: a tell.
This mayor didn’t invent the friendly spokesperson. Bill de Blasio used influencers to sell vaccines during COVID, and Mamdani’s team argues legacy media is hobbled by paywalls and corporate ownership, so working around it is just modernization.
Fine. Modernize away. But modernizing how government talks to people differs from concealing how much it pays people to talk for it, through an app built to make evidence disappear. A mayor doing interviews with TikTok stars is no scandal. Taxpayer money moving through a thousand-plus unnamed creators with no public ledger and a chat log that resets itself is another matter.
Mamdani told reporters this week his administration would “look into it immediately” if it found departures from what the law requires. That’s a fine sentiment for a podium, but a paper trail would carry more weight. The City Council is reportedly planning a hearing. A watchdog group has asked the Department of Investigation to open one. Albany lawmakers have introduced a bill requiring paid political posts to be disclosed like any other campaign ad. All three should move, and quickly, because right now the only people who know this operation’s true size are the ones running it.
George Orwell borrowed the name for his Ministry of Truth from Britain’s real wartime Ministry of Information. New York didn’t need to invent a dystopia. It just needed an encrypted app, a marketing budget nobody will itemize, and a mayor’s office that would rather explain its principles than answer a records request. Taxpayers deserve to know who is cashing the check for their own government’s fan club. So far, City Hall isn’t saying, and that silence is the story.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.