Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s chief counsel said Friday that he took “immediate corrective action” after learning a City Hall communications staffer set some chats on an encrypted app to “auto-delete” official messages.
The Columbia Journalism Review earlier this week published an article by university researchers showing the mayor’s new-media team used the app Signal to share information with an extensive network of influencers and content creators.
Chief Counsel Ramzi Kassem said at the time that there wasn’t a city policy against using Signal and some employees could be authorized to use it — even though early in Mamdani’s tenure he penned an order barring the use of Signal and similar apps.
The app has multiple features, including auto-delete, whose use is against the city’s records retention policy.
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The New York Times reported earlier Friday that chats between a member of Mamdani’s communications team and at least one specific content creator were set to auto-delete — making them unavailable for official archiving and 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 at an unrelated press conference.
Kassem said there isn’t a “blanket ban” on the use of Signal, noting it has tools like large group management that make it useful for some work.
It’s unclear if or when Emilia Winter Rowland, who ran the Signal chats and oversees new media for the mayor, sought permission to use the app for official government business.
Counsel’s Memo Barred Signal and WhatsApp
A “communications requirements and best practices” memo sent to staff on Jan. 15, just two weeks into Mamdani’s administration, and shared with The City Reporter explicitly forbade the use of Signal and WhatsApp.
“You should not use WhatsApp, Signal, or any other communications app or platform for work. If you have questions about the use of other platforms, please contact the Office of the Chief Counsel,” said the memo, which was signed by Kassem and other legal officials in the mayor’s office.
Good-government group Reinvent Albany praised Mamdani’s use of influencers to share his message, along with some agencies’ longstanding use of paid influencers. But it criticized the use of Signal and the storage of city government messages on third-party servers.
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“Even now in 2026, the City of New York has not developed a practical way for official records created by these apps to be archived or retrieved by agency FOIL officers, who cannot search them by key words like they can city emails,” the group said in a statement, referring to Freedom of Information requests.
“From the outside, the public cannot tell if a city official is using an instant messaging app because they are poorly trained and know nothing about the official records archiving requirements in the City Charter, or they are deliberately breaking the law and trying to hide or destroy city records,” the group added.
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The post Mamdani Team Deletes Auto-Delete in Influencer Chats appeared first on The City Reporter.
