Did You Hear the Gossip? Mamdani Started a WhatsApp Channel for Spanish-Speakers

A Spanish-language WhatsApp channel to connect Spanish-speaking New Yorkers directly with City Hall was launched recently by Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

It’s playfully called El Chisme Oficial de NYC (“The official gossip of NYC”). The channel’s followers—whom the Mayor’s Office is cheekily calling “chismosos” (gossipers)—will receive reminders about resources the City offers; links to events across the boroughs; service updates; behind-the-scenes videos from the mayor’s team as he prepares to make statements from the podium; Wednesday morning news roundups; and occasional voice notes from Mayor Mamdani himself. It’s not a chat, so followers can’t reply to messages, but they can react with emojis.

The earliest messages following its launch on July 7 included updates on a building in midtown that was at risk of collapse, a link to a World Cup Final watch party lottery, a reminder about the Fair Fares transit discount program, and an announcement about Next Stop, a program that aims to accelerate bus travel.

In an interview with Telemundo, Mamdani said he hoped El Chisme would help more New Yorkers learn what the administration was doing directly, rather than try to interpret information that may have been muddied by misinterpretation and speculation by the time it got to them. This direct line would cut through the chatter “in a time when rumors spread so fast.”

El Chisme, which the Mayor’s Office launched along with a Spanish-language Instagram account, is part of a larger push for language equity. On July 6, The NYC Department of City Planning introduced the NYC Language Explorer, a tool that aims to illuminate the city’s language needs.

“NYC Language Explorer serves as another example of this administration’s commitment to language justice,” said Commissioner Faiza N. Ali of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs via a press release. The tool, which draws data from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, shows that there are about 843,000 Spanish speakers in NYC with limited English proficiency—123,000 of whom live in Manhattan.

The Mayor’s Office said it chose WhatsApp for El Chisme because it’s already a popular application among this demographic. “Spanish-speaking New Yorkers are on WhatsApp and Instagram every day, so that is where City Hall should be, too,” he said.

WhatsApp is the go-to personal and professional messaging app in many countries across Latin America. It’s popular partly because it’s data efficient—sending a WhatsApp message consumes far less data than sending an email, for instance—and because it’s often available at low-cost: many phone plans across Latin America offer WhatsApp as a zero-rated app, which means mobile users can access it without tapping into their monthly data allowance. (Per data from Tarifica, most plans across the region include WhatsApp as a zero-rated app, and over half of plans include free unlimited WhatsApp.)

WhatsApp also has notable privacy features. It’s end-to-end encrypted, unlike standard text messaging. And while users have never had to reveal their numbers when joining a channel, this year WhatsApp is adding usernames so that users will never have to share their numbers at all. (This feature will start later in 2026, but users can reserve a username now on the app.)

And then there is the voice note, a feature WhatsApp incorporated in 2013 and has since popularized as an alternative to texts and calls.( I am abandoning journalistic objectivity here: I am partial to the voice note.)

For friends and family living far apart and across time zones, voice notes bridge the dialogue between lengthier phone calls that can be difficult to coordinate. Perhaps this is why they’re especially popular in some countries with large diasporas, such as Mexico.

A voice note also has more texture than a text. You can hear a friend’s familiar vocal quirks and turns of phrase as they think out loud. You can perceive the environment they’re recording from—the buzz of their apartment building, the distant voices of their neighbors, the fuzzy announcement at their subway stop. Voice notes also feel more vulnerable; they’re unedited and often punctuated by asides and interruptions.

Mamdani’s voice notes in El Chisme will of course be scripted, rehearsed, un-rambly, and far less likely to end in “sorry this was so long” than the notes I send to my close friends. But they will feel like intimacy and candidness. He’ll drop a note, and followers will press play, the mayor’s ever-improving Spanish in their ears.

On July 7, Mamdani signed off on his first note: “Esto apenas empieza” (“This has only just begun.”)