The New York Post quoted the coalition on September 2 in its story on the City Hall Signal chat with influencers. Two days later City Hall admitted a staffer had the chat set to auto-delete.
How the City Hall Signal chat works
A Columbia Journalism Review study found that the mayor’s new-media team runs an encrypted Signal group called “NYC Creators Announcements” for nearly 200 influencers and content creators. Members get daily updates, talking points and clips to use in their posts.
The group grew out of Creators4Zohran, an influencer network from last year’s campaign. It is run by Emilia Rowland, the mayor’s Director of New Media and Cultural Communications. Signal can be set to delete messages automatically.
What we told the Post
“Government records do not stop being government records because an official uses Signal, a personal phone, or another non-government platform.”
“The City’s own records policy is clear as well. Instant messages about City decisions, actions, or policies must be preserved, including those sent on personal devices or third-party platforms. If messages about public business are disappearing because officials chose an app that allows them to disappear, that’s a serious open-government problem.”
“Government officials should not be able to make public records disappear simply by choosing the right app.”
City Hall’s first answer
The response came from chief counsel Ramzi Kassem: “There is no City policy against using Signal.” He said the app can be authorized for specific uses “subject to compliance with applicable City record retention policies and the New York State Freedom of Information Law.”
Whether the chat’s messages were set to auto-delete was unclear at the time.
Two days later
On September 4, The City Reporter’s Katie Honan reported that Kassem had taken “immediate corrective action” after learning that a City Hall communications staffer had set some chats to auto-delete.
The New York Times had found that chats between a member of the communications team and at least one content creator were set to disappear, which made them unavailable for archiving and for public records requests. Officials disabled the function after the Times asked about it.
“When we learned about this incident from reporting, we took immediate corrective action,” Kassem said.
The memo from January
The City Reporter also obtained a “communications requirements and best practices” memo sent to staff on January 15, two weeks into the administration. It was signed by Kassem and other lawyers in the mayor’s office.
“You should not use WhatsApp, Signal, or any other communications app or platform for work.”
Kassem now says there is no “blanket ban” on Signal. Whether Rowland sought permission to use it for government business is unknown.
What the fix leaves open
Reinvent Albany put the practical problem well in its statement to The City Reporter: the city still has no working way for records created in these apps to be archived or retrieved by agency FOIL officers, who cannot search them by keyword the way they can search email. From the outside, the group said, the public cannot tell whether an official using a messaging app is poorly trained or deliberately destroying records.
The fix City Hall announced is turning off a setting. That does not recover what was deleted before a reporter asked, and it does not answer whether other staff chats were set the same way.
Those are the questions a FOIL request, or the Department of Investigation, should put to the mayor’s office next.
Read the coverage
Mamdani’s 200-strong ‘influencer’ army revealed, with some PR peddlers pocketing taxpayer cash, New York Post, September 2, 2026
Mamdani Team Deletes Auto-Delete in Influencer Chats, The City Reporter, September 4, 2026
The Post citation is also logged on our media page.
