Mayor Zohran Mamdani has assembled an army of nearly 200 “influencers” — giving the social media stars VIP access to push the lefty administration’s talking points, according to a new bombshell report.
The study by the Columbia Journalism Review this week revealed a web of online personalities are being fed talking points by City Hall in an encrypted Signal group text, potentially running afoul of local record-keeping laws.
Some of the influencers are even pocketing taxpayer funds “for work on particular messaging campaigns,” though not for their coverage, the report said.
The official Mamdani cheerleaders chat spawned from Creators4Zohran, which started during the mayoral campaign, according to the report.
“A group of content creators and influencers, the Creators4Zohran group that supported his election campaign was reconfigured to promote coverage and talking points from the Mayor’s office,” the report reads.
“The group is run by the Director of New Media and Cultural Communications at the NYC Office of the Mayor, Emilia Rowland, and her staff, and members of the group receive daily updates, talking points and clips that they can use in their posts.”
One of the influencers highlighted by Creators4Zohran, Allie O’Brien, recently said Mamdani was the “mayor of uncontrollable joy” in a worshipping social post.
Director of New Media and Cultural Communications at the NYC Office of the Mayor Emilia Rowland in an undated photo.X/EmiliaWinterRo
O’Brien, though, appears to live in Connecticut from online records.
Another out-of-NYC influencer, who goes by the handle bananadotgov on Instagram, is from Columbus, Ohio, and has posted a number of lionizing videos about Mamdani.
“Strange things are happening, because I have literally not felt this way about a politician since Bernie Sanders,” she said, responding to the mayor saying he wouldn’t take a pay raise in July.
“William,” a middle-aged man in a blue short-sleeved button-down shirt whose YouTube videos have more than 14 million views, looked straight into the camera at his kitchen table in August and read a script about New York City’s mayor. His video, Mayor Mamdani Panics as Taylor Swift Triggers a $2.3 Billion Celebrity Exodus, quickly racked up more than 474,000 views.
“Omar,” a shaggy, bearded creator who claimed to be based in New York, read a report to viewers in June about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her ex. AOC FREAKS OUT as Riley Roberts CAUGHT Running Her ENTIRE Operation, set to ominous music, got more than 250,000 views. The same music played on a video, Socialist Seattle Mayor CRIES As A Beloved Bookstore Closes, from a channel called Julian News Report. It also registered a quarter of a million views.
To the casual YouTube viewer, these would look like unconnected videos from political news creators outraged by events happening in cities led by Democrats. The reality is more complicated. “William” and “Omar” are actors, Semafor found in a forensic accounting of their channels’ origins. They were reading formulaic, repetitive scripts that appeared to be generated or aided by large-language models.
Over the last several months, a new generation of YouTube growth-hackers have flooded American politics with sensationalized, low-quality content, reaching millions of viewers with nearly identical videos taking aim at progressive politicians including Zohran Mamdani, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. Notably, while the videos are presented as laypeople giving straight-to-camera ideological news recaps, they feature actors and spokespeople paid small amounts of money to read nearly identical scripts laced with misleading claims and outright falsehoods.
Viewers either didn’t notice or didn’t mind: A single network of interconnected videos that are affiliated with a growth-hacking company whose founder promises to be the “strongest alternative to paid ads” garnered well over 45 million views and 90,000 comments on YouTube as well as millions more impressions across social platforms like TikTok. With that level of viral videos, a small media organization can make tens or even hundreds of thousands a month.
For the president, data centers are the “Golden Goose,” as he put it Monday on Truth Social. They’re one of the few investment engines humming in an otherwise sputtering economy and a cornerstone of the administration’s strategic AI arms race with China.
Trump is defending them because they’re also an albatross around Republicans’ necks heading into the November election.
And no small part of that position, as is often the case with Trump, is economics. The bright spot in construction is increasingly data centers, not the factories Trump promised through his push to reshore manufacturing.
“Trump is married to data centers no matter what because it’s the only real job creator,” said one former Trump administration official. That former official, and others quoted in this article, were granted anonymity to speak frankly about the controversial topic.
Telling communities they would end up “backwards and poor” if they rejected data centers is the most blunt he’s been on the issue as Republicans rapidly abandoned ship amid widespread public backlash.
And expect the president to “continue leveraging the data center boom to deliver real benefits for working families and small businesses,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said in a statement.
Trump called Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision to pause approvals for new data centers “a mistake” last month, before later telling reporters, “If a Republican’s against a data center, that’s OK with me.”
Despite the split, Trump doesn’t believe Republican candidates are crossing a red line in staking out a more skeptical position, the senior White House official added.
Vulnerable House Republicans returned to Washington this week pushing for action before the midterms on reining in data centers, only to find their leadership still undecided on the volatile issue.
Further complicating the debate: President Donald Trump’s Truth Social post Monday saying that the only reason Americans might not want data centers built in their communities is if they “want to end up being backwards and poor.”
The desire for action on data centers, which had already divided the House GOP conference, came up in multiple member discussions early this week — including a conversation that House Speaker Mike Johnson hosted Monday with freshman lawmakers, Republicans told POLITICO.
Multiple lawmakers pushed back on Trump’s Monday comments in the closed-door meeting and in other conversations with Johnson and House GOP leaders, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter.
“My communities know what they want to live next to and what they want to co-inhabit with,” said Republican Rep. Rob Bresnahan, who is running for reelection in a competitive Pennsylvania district, in response to the Trump data center decree. “And that’s why it’s so important that Congress [acts.]”
The need to act “was a big topic of conversation in the freshman meeting yesterday,” he said of the Johnson meeting. “I know a few of us have similar, different pieces of legislation, but there’s certainly a willingness, from my perspective, that this is something that we can’t run from, and our communities are begging us for help.”
Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, told POLITICO he’s hoping his legislation meant to curb the impact that data centers have on the electrical grid can bridge the divide between parts of the GOP — including Trump — who have doubled down on data centers, and party vulnerables who want to respond to constituent backlash against the AI infrastructure.
He’s pushing Johnson to schedule a vote on the bill, approved by his committee earlier this year, in the coming month. Guthrie believes the so-called Ratepayer Protection Act and another bill on data center water use align with Trump’s recent data center support while still providing relief for the communities where they’re built. “Our model is the Ratepayer Protection Pledge,” Guthrie said, referring to a White House compact released earlier this year to ensure tech companies pay for the energy costs associated with data centers.
Americans’ perceptions of government corruption in the U.S. are at their highest level in 20 years, with 89% of U.S. adults saying it is widespread. That figure is up 10 percentage points from last year and well above readings in the 72% to 79% range between 2010 and 2025.
Democrats’ perceptions of government corruption have risen the most sharply since 2024 compared with other party groups. In former President Joe Biden’s final year in office, 57% of Democrats said corruption was widespread in government; that rose to 76% in 2025, the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, and reached 91% this year. The figure among political independents (90%) aligns more closely with Democrats’ than with Republicans’ (83%) and is up 12 points since 2024.
Republicans’ views of corruption have changed far less in the same period. For the past two years, about eight in 10 have said corruption is widespread, broadly in line with 2024, when 87% said the same.
“In the age of wooden television in the South where I grew up, leisure involved sitting on screened porches, smoking cigarettes, drinking iced tea, engaging in conversation, and staring into space. It might also involve fishing. Sometimes the Web does remind me of fishing.”
