The New York Post is appalled that Mayor Zohran Mamdani is "using taxpayer money to push [his] agenda with 200-member TikTok army," very serious journalists are typing the words "Signal" and "influencer" with the contempt you'd spit-out a three-hour-old piece of Dentyne Ice, and the New York City Council is gearing up for a goshdarn oversight hearing, because something sure seems rotten in Denmark.
If the latest mayoral brouhaha is an ice cream sundae, the scoops of vanilla are a genuinely interesting media story [Ed note: Oxymoron?], with a heaping ladleful of bad-faith butterscotch sauce (disgusting) underneath a dollop of questionable municipal record-keeping whipped cream and two gleaming cherries of professional insecurity. Let us explain.
What in the—why are you talking about dessert? I thought this story was about how the mayor spends taxpayer resources cultivating a zombie clout army that beams his talking points out to untold millions?
Shut up. Earlier this week, Columbia University's Initiative for Public Dialogue released a report that examined how Mayor Mamdani's City Hall uses social media influencers to burnish his image, and disseminate information to the widest possible audience.
"We demonstrate that there are two types of relationships in place," Dr. Anya Schiffrin, the main author of the report, writes. "There is a Signal group which the Mayor's office uses to communicate with a hand-picked group of influencers. There are also pilot programs aimed at using influencers on Instagram and TikTok to promote City services including immigration rights, public budgeting processes, and tenants' rights, as well as pre-existing campaigns providing information about voting and health care."