NEW YORK CITY mayor Zohran Mamdani, who rode a social media-fueled campaign to Gracie Mansion, is reversing an Eric Adams–era directive barring TikTok from government-owned devices. Local agencies will now be able to post about their projects on the app, though with new guardrails to protect city networks.
“The Mamdani administration is committed to using every tool in our toolbox to communicate with New Yorkers,” says the email to agencies, obtained by WIRED. “At a moment when people are turning to city government for information about free services, emergency situations, upcoming events, and more, we want to open up new avenues of communication with the public and help deliver the information New Yorkers need.”
In August 2023, then-mayor Adams barred the use of TikTok on government devices, joining the ranks of other state and federal agencies that at the time deemed the app a major security risk. Adams spokesperson Jonah Allon said then that the city’s Cyber Command office had decided that TikTok, which was owned by the Chinese-based company ByteDance, “posed a security threat to the city’s technical networks and directed its removal from city-owned devices.”
The directive resulted in a number of popular city-run accounts shutting down, including accounts for the NYC Departments of Sanitation and Parks and Recreation. As of Tuesday morning, the accounts’ bios read, “This account was operated by NYC until August 2023. It’s no longer monitored.”
