Nylifer

I don't believe you, as a professional, don't understand the ethical and potentially legal problems here, whether people were paid or not. But let me spell it out for you: The problem is not using influencers to get out messages. The problem is an undisclosed, coordinated PR campaign, with none of the messages labelled as PR communications so that they intentionally and misleadingly seem organic, and coordination with the influencers via Signal to make government communication and the people's work undiscoverable, un-FOIL-able and unaccountable. To try to turn the conversation to the topic of legacy media is cynical and disingenuous. I spent 25 years in the news business and now I work in government communications. It's absolutely true that we in government have had to, and want to, use new media and new media channels to directly communicate with the public. But to pretend our messaging is not ours but organically coming from the public and hiding our communications with an army of shills so the records of our government work on behalf of the people aren't retained and aren't discoverable stinks to high heaven and everybody gets that. Furthermore, in this case, the messaging seems -- although we can't know because you're hiding the government work product from the people -- to be focused on aggrandizing the mayor himself, not city governance messaging, all but eradicating the line between legitimate government communication and illegally using taxpayer resources -- including the time spent by city employees during work hours coordinating with influencers -- for political and campaign purposes. The whole thing really smells. On top of all that, just from a cynical comms POV, now that it's out, you've totally shot the credibility of any of your shills, or even anyone in the public who just legitimately posts positive information about the mayor, because now no one will believe it's real or organic. Any time any of us see the next Mamadi-glazing post, we're going to suspect is from one of your living Mamdani-bots. Also, from a comms perspective, you should know, that the best response now is just to come clean, say it's an intent to get info out, not an intent to deceive, we'll retain all our records of communications with influencers and ask them to label content going forward and we'll publish the list of influencers we're communicating with. Apologize and disclose. Trying to redirect the legitimate criticism and then trying to go on with the same operation as if it never happened is never going to work. That's also basic comms.