Progressive social media figures connected to a private group chat tied to the Mamdani administration moved quickly Thursday to back the mayor, openly acknowledging that they share City Hall’s preferred messaging with their audiences while presenting it as news-style content.
Among them was “Vote In Or Out,” a left-leaning, anti-Trump Instagram account with 1.1 million followers, whose creator publicly revealed her relationship with City Hall and praised the access she receives from the administration.
“I genuinely do not know how such a small team manages to communicate with so many of us,” wrote Lisa Chin Mollica, the 48-year-old Brooklyn resident behind the account, in a message to her followers.
She described the outreach as “a constant stream of information, events, policies,” adding that she was “genuinely happy to do it.”
Mollica said she is in frequent, and often direct, contact with the mayor’s media operation, which provides her with ongoing updates on policy, public events, background details and access to administration messaging.
The Instagram account’s bio says it shares “news” as well as other “perspectives,” and it previously produced what it described as a nonpartisan, fact-checked voter guide during the 2020 election cycle.
Yet amid a steady flow of anti-Trump and anti-ICE posts, the page also features highly localized Mamdani administration content, with captions that closely mirror the tone and language of official mayoral communications.
One Sept. 2 post, paired with footage of the mayor at a press conference announcing a pause on generative artificial intelligence use for city students, declared: “New York City introduces its first comprehensive AI policy for public schools.”
Mollica, who said she has “never been paid” by the Mamdani team, described an outreach operation where City Hall employees — on taxpayer dime — contact her often, sometimes directly by text, to give “background and access” that helps her account reach New Yorkers with the administration’s preferred messaging.
One user clapped back in the comments of Mollica’s post explaining she doesn’t do paid work for the Mamdani administration: “You might not work for Mamdani, but the bias is very much real.”
Her account also reposted content from some of the other nearly 200 influencers in City Hall’s group chat on the encrypted app Signal — which was revealed this week in a bombshell report by the Columbia Journalism Review and is now set to be the subject of a City Council oversight hearing Sept. 22.
The CJR researchers also found that some of the digital content producers had been paid by city agencies for outreach campaigns, but had little detail on the contracts, and Mamdani’s team didn’t answer questions beyond defending the use of Signal.
The administration also ignored inquires Thursday about whether it activated its spin Signal machine to counter coverage of the CJR report, including in The Post’s front-page story.
Other influencers also happily admitted to being part of Mamdani’s secret network of content creators after his admin’s social media coordination via the “NYC Creators Announcement” chat was outed.
Cassie Willson proudly posted a screenshot to her 314,000 followers on Instagram Thursday of a fake-looking check for $10,000 she quipped she received as payment from the Mamdani campaign.
“If they had actually done their research, they would have found this very real check that I have in my New York City apartment that I got from the Mamdani campaign,” she said.
She then gushed that since becoming mayor, Mamdani’s team has done “an amazing job of connecting with a bunch of New York City-based creators to tell us about stuff that’s going on in the administration like when they roll out new policies or programs.
“A program or policy is only as good as the number of people who know about it, right?” she said.
Willson also came to Mamdani’s rescue after the mayor was heavily criticized for leaving Little Italy off his immigrant enclave map. After the scandal broke Willson made a post poking fun of the Italian festival in Williamsburg for not being “authentic” since it included cuisine like funnel cakes and empanadas.
It was unclear if City Hall had fed Willson talking point to give the mayor cover.
Another influencer who came forward, Ariana Afshar, in one breath claimed she simply “covers the news” and in another professed her “genuine” love for the Mamdani administration.
“I just cover the news and anything I say is because I genuinely love Mamdani’s administration,” Afshar, 30, whose LinkedIn said she lives in the Bay Area, California, wrote in a post Thursday to her 433,000 followers on Instagram.
Miral Sattar, a 47-year-old publishing entrepreneur behind the book-focused Instagram account @miralreads, admitted she works with the Mamdani administration, but said officials don’t dictate what she posts about.
“Sometimes I ask them for clips because I saw something I want to cover,” Sattar said, adding that she’s been supporting Mamdani since the beginning of his mayoral campaign.
“I was posting about Zohran before he was mayor. My kids and I canvassed for him when he was polling at basically 1%,” Sattar gushed on Instagram to her more than 28,000 followers.
Megan Klink, 28, and runs the progressive-policy podcast “Pretty Informed Girls” slammed “legacy media” in an Instagram rant Thursday for “f–king lying” while praising the mayor’s office for being “incredibly f–king good.”
“The people that work in the mayor’s office are incredibly f–king good at their jobs,” Klink said.
“They have created this wonderful ecosystem of influencers and creators and all sorts of people who are able to get out information that legacy media won’t cover,” she said, claiming a lack of coverage about warming centers — which The Post and multiple new organizations covered during the winter cold front in which several New Yorkers froze to death.
