New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is popular. People online would like to be popular. To achieve that, they are posting about Mamdani. The New York Times is on the case.
In a report on the Mayor’s seemingly outsized popularity online, the Times insinuates that Mamdani has a paid propaganda arm made up of online influencers who are happy to sing his praises on command—though it admits it has more innuendo than evidence.
Per the Times, Mamdani’s director of new media and cultural communications has cultivated a network of online accounts that she sends talking points to when the administration has a new initiative it would like to push. Those creators and commentators then post about the policy, boosting it to their followers. In exchange, they get to stay in the loop and seem to maybe occasionally get access to the mayor. The Times reports that influencers have been “invited to events with the mayor where some traditional reporters are excluded.”
The Mayor’s office told the Times that it doesn’t pay influencers for posts, and the Times doesn’t really suggest that it can prove the opposite. Instead, the publication noted, “their proximity and access to a figure as popular as Mr. Mamdani can help increase their own social media following and, by extension, potentially put them in a position to attract paid content sponsorships from commercial brands. Some influencers said that when they feature Mr. Mamdani, the videos get more likes, and viewers watch longer.”
The report does highlight a handful of creators who have been paid by city agencies through programs they operate to promote policy agendas, but it doesn’t overtly suggest that those payments are a misuse of those programs’ funding.
Frankly, a lot of it just sounds like standard creator behavior more so than something malicious. Influencers find a topic that gets attention, and they keep hitting that button. This is not to say that the specific people featured in this story are like this, but a lot of creators are straight-up empty vessels who trade in the currency of attention, so anything that provides them more of that is what they care about. It’s part of why there has historically been a tendency for creators to make a right-wing pivot, because there is both a large audience and a lot of money to be made from the conservative movement. And if that’s all you care about, rather than having genuinely held beliefs, it’s a pretty easy grift if you’re shameless enough.
There’s no doubt that what the Mamdani administration is doing is propaganda. And it’s more than fair to call into question just how organic some of the content is. We live in a time where everything is a psy-op, and nothing is truly authentic. But the Times leads its story with a post that actually is authentic praise of Mamdani from a commentator neither paid nor contacted by the administration and then wonders, “But what if it was paid for, though?”
And while there is no doubt some folks are eager to play uncritical hypeman for the administration in exchange for access, it’s not like there isn’t a lot of authentic attention that the mayor has managed to generate online. Videos from New Yorkers pointing to problems like potholes that get fixed within days of posting have gotten so popular that people around the world have started asking Mamdani to help fix their problems—an annoyance to New Yorkers who are seeing their makeshift pipeline to municipal services crowded by attention seekers.
That kind of stuff is probably more effective than any repackaged talking point from some policy wonk, in part because sending out memos is easy and doing the actual work is hard. Look no further than Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass trying to draft off Mamdani’s rapid response trend, only to not actually fix the pothole that a citizen asked to be filled in.
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