It is no surprise Zohran Mamdani surrounds himself with people like himself. Not working people, nepo babies. People who complain about the rich, while they have never gone without in their lives.

Add another name and political job to the list. We’ve already seen Gustavo Gordillo take the New York City DSA for a ride on his lies while living large in a rowhouse owned by Mommy and Daddy, now we get to meet Emilia Winter Rowland, who was hailed by the New York Times as the social media director making sure that Mamdani gets his message out for all the Gen Z followers.

The influencers effort is led by Emilia Rowland, a new media expert who worked on Mr. Mamdani’s mayoral campaign and his transition team. Ms. Rowland, who earns $175,000 as the mayor’s director of new media and cultural communications, contended that working with influencers was a higher priority than interacting with traditional journalists.

“At a moment of profound distrust in politics, our job is not to preserve decades-old communications norms or protect the gatekeepers who once controlled access to public information,” Ms. Rowland said.

“The monopolization of the media has resulted in legacy press hemorrhaging readers and viewers, essential reporting often locked behind paywalls and ownership increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small number of wealthy corporations and billionaires who exert their own editorial agendas over the news,” she added.

Ms. Rowland, who used to work for the Democratic National Committee, created Mr. Mamdani’s influencer outreach model during his campaign. She began direct messaging influencers and asking them to make content about Mr. Mamdani, offering coveted access with the aim of ensuring that the candidate’s goings-on were reaching millions of people who might not have already followed him.

When Ms. Rowland moved into City Hall, that operation came with her, but now its costs are publicly funded. She sends the influencers updates on the mayor’s priorities, from tenant hearings to outdoor dining and taxes.

The mayor’s office says that it does not pay the influencers. Still, 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.

And some influencers have gotten paid through programs run by city agencies to promote policy agendas.

Others have defended their work as an important public service motivated by their belief in the mayor’s policies.

But the NYT admitted that this entire set up is problematic, and Team Mamdani wasn’t exactly forthcoming with the details.

The administration regularly sends the influencers memos on the mayor’s priorities and encourages them to trumpet his accomplishments, all outside of public scrutiny. The missives are delivered in group chats on Signal, an encrypted messaging app designed to shield posts from public review.

The lack of transparency concerns watchdog groups. And the mayor’s office declined to provide The New York Times with details of City Hall’s social media operation, including the budget of the new media office, a list of the social media influencers used and the total spending by city government on influencer campaigns.

The Columbia Journalism Review then caught on to the Signal chat issue, noticing that the group, named “NYC Creators Announcements” had over 200 influencers and yes, messages from the Mamdani administration were getting deleted. That spurred other media to start asking questions, and other New York politicians to point out the legal issues. Mamdani himself had to run interference.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani is continuing to defend his administration amid concerns about how City Hall interacts with social media influencers.

“City Hall has never paid a content creator or influencer for an interview or engagement with myself,” he said on Friday.

A recent report in the Columbia Journalism Review revealed that the administration maintains a 200-person group chat with social media influencers on the messaging application Signal. Later reporting by the New York Times revealed that one staffer was deleting messages in the chat group in violation of a city records law.

“When we learned about this incident from reporting, we took immediate corrective action. And of course, we will continue with our practice of training with our staff to be in compliance with city rules and regulations,” Ramzi Kassem, chief counsel to the mayor, said.

“The corrective actions that we took included reminding staff to disable disappearing messages,” he added.

That admission from the mayor’s chief counsel was a doozy – and caught their lauded social media “magician” straight in the Signal. It turned out that Emilia Rowland was the staffer in question who had set all her messages in this group to auto-delete.

Watchdogs and critics argued the self-destructing messages not only clearly violated state law requiring public officials to maintain records, but also dovetailed with concerns that Mamdani’s administration was underhandedly trying to sway public opinion.

City Councilman Phil Wong is pushing a bill to provide guardrails for how New York City government taps influencers after it was revealed Mamdani’s staff maintained the secret chat feeding online personalities administration talking points.

“Council members are racing to introduce legislation because this is one of the biggest scandals we’ve seen out of City Hall, and the administration calling it a ‘faux scandal’ after they royally screwed up only makes it worse,” he told The Post on Friday.

“Blatantly using taxpayer dollars and government resources for a propaganda machine is a huge red flag, and the Council needs to come down hard on it because New York City has a mayor, not a king.”

Criminal attorney Cory H. Morris, who handles lawsuits over public records violations, said the use of Signal — an encrypted messaging app that prominently features disappearing messages — implies Mamdani’s staff is sharing communications they don’t want the public to see.

“It’s not innocuous,” Morris told The Post.

“They are trying to evade the records law by using something that destroys the records, or for that matter, that doesn’t keep a record.”

And then the New York Post revealed Emilia Rowland’s background.

City Hall’s head of New Media Emilia Winter Rowland’s grandfather appears to have founded The Rowland Agency, a powerhouse PR firm. Both of her parents work in the field, while her 100-year-old grandmother Joan Rowland lives in a roughly $3 million condo near Billionaires’ Row, public records show.

Rowland, whose title is director of new media and cultural communications, joined Mamdani’s administration after wrangling influencers for the fresh-faced socialist’s mayoral campaign in 2025.

She previously worked for the Democratic National Committee and as press secretary for Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman’s 2022 campaign, her LinkedIn states.

Working in PR is a family business of sorts for Rowland, who didn’t return calls from The Post on Friday.

That condo her grandmother lives in? Mamdani City Hall claims that she got lucky and the place is “rent-controlled” for only $3,300 a month. Both Rowland’s parents have worked in TV and marketing. She definitely grew up well-off, though unlike Gordillo, she has never claimed working class roots. She did, however, decide to quote herself on X in order to complain about “wealthy corporations and billionaires” running the news. Unlike her, who gets a healthy salary at taxpayer expense, and makes sure influencers get connections and get paid through those connections in order to promote Zohran Mamdani.

More to say soon, but for now ↓ https://t.co/h7HWDAc8Nf pic.twitter.com/TlLzlDraEJ

— Emilia Winter Rowland (@EmiliaWinterRo) September 4, 2026

Emilia Winter Rowland is going to have to change the way she does her business, or she’s going to find herself at the receiving end of some pretty big legal problems. It already sounds like Team Mamdani is going to pin everything on her in order to keep the Lord Mayor’s hands clean, even if he has winked and nodded at how all these “influencers” have showed up to promote him. This means no more disappearing messages on Signal, more public disclosure, and more scrutiny of Rowland’s work for Mamdani, especially if the city council decides to get involved.

Featured image: original Victory Girls art by Darleen Click