Katie Porter's campaign for California governor paid a TikTok creator named Avery Cyrus $25,000 for what appeared to be a single post. Cyrus has 9.5 million followers. The post came down after The New York Times asked about it.
California is just where the receipt surfaced. The price tag is national now, and it hangs on anybody with an audience that believes them. Your feed tells you where to eat on a Tuesday night, which block to take the train to, and which family deserves your forty dollars. Campaigns have figured out what that kind of belief is worth, and they are paying cash for it.
A SINGLE POST COST $25,000 AND THEN VANISHED ONCE THE NEW YORK TIMES ASKED
The Times went through campaign filings and laid the numbers out in August. Porter's campaign paid 12 influencers a total of $139,500. Cyrus got the $25,000. Porter told the paper that everything was reviewed and complied with the law. Cyrus did not respond. Her agency's chief executive said the firm was never asked to handle disclosure.
The rate is not a fluke. The Boston Globe reported that TheShadeRoom took $25,000 for one post to its more than 28 million followers. An October report from the Center for Democracy & Technology and the University of Pittsburgh, cited by the Los Angeles Times, found creators getting anywhere from a few hundred dollars to as much as $30,000 per post.
THE CHECKS COME FROM BOTH PARTIES AND THE FILINGS BARELY SAY WHAT THEY BOUGHT
Tom Steyer's run for California governor paid 17 influencers at least $5,000 each, according to the Times. One of them, Carlos Eduardo Espina, who has over 14 million TikTok followers, collected $400,000. Espina has argued that he was paid for work other than posting. CalMatters reported that regulators opened an investigation into one Steyer video, a now deleted post by creator Isaiah Washington, who was paid $10,000 and did not disclose it. Steyer's campaign says its contracts required disclosure.
The other side of the aisle is on the same menu. The National Republican Congressional Committee paid more than $120,000 to Creator Grid, a conservative influencer network, between 2025 and 2026, and the filing describes it as "media." In April, a Kentucky newspaper exposed a coordinated network of influencers boosting Republican Senate candidate Nate Morris. None of them acknowledged being paid.
Super PACs run the same play under other words. Freedom PA, which backed Chris Rabb in Pennsylvania, disclosed payments to nearly 50 influencers for "social media consulting."
New York is not a spectator here. Chuck Park, who ran for Congress here this year and lost, listed a $300 payment to creator Josh Greene as "staff salary." Park told the Times that Greene was not actually employed by the campaign. Greene posted at least five videos promoting Park. None said he was paid.
Read those filing labels again. Media. Consulting. Staff salary. Every one of them tells you a check cleared. None of them tells you it bought the video you watched on the train this morning and believed.
A CREATOR MUST LABEL A PAID TACO BUT NOT A PAID POST ABOUT YOUR SENATOR
Here is the part that should make you put the fork down. If a brand pays a creator to post about its hot sauce, federal commercial rules say that relationship gets disclosed. If a campaign pays that same creator to post about a Senate candidate, those commercial rules do not reach it. The Federal Election Commission wrote disclosure rules for digital ads in 2023 and decided not to touch influencers. The Times put it flatly: no federal regulations require disclosure of payments for political support on social media.
So the same phone, on the same tripod, in the same restaurant, plays by a stricter rulebook for a taco than for a senator.
Campaigns have every reason to enjoy that. The Times reported that they see these endorsements as a vital way to reach voters at a fraction of what traditional ads cost. A TV spot comes with a disclaimer at the end. A rave from someone you follow comes with your guard down.
Sen. Adam Schiff and Rep. Mark Takano have introduced the PAID Act to close the hole in Washington. Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz says only four states have rules of their own.
NEW YORK'S SENATE VOTED 59 TO 2 AND THE FIX STILL SITS IN COMMITTEE
New York has a bill. Sen. Liz Krueger and Dinowitz wrote it. It would make campaign paid social posts carry a "paid for by" label and get filed with the state Board of Elections like every other political communication. The Senate passed it 59 to 2 on March 19. That same day it went over to the Assembly and landed in the Codes Committee. The state's own bill tracker still has it there.
New York already requires campaigns to disclose paid political communication on printed and digital materials. What it lacks is a rule that speaks to a creator talking into a phone. Columbia University researchers who studied influencers and public money in the city this year called it a regulatory gap that should be addressed.
Fifty-nine state senators agreed on this. Try getting 59 New Yorkers to agree on a bagel. The Assembly has let it sit through a full election season.
CITY HALL'S CREATOR GROUP NOW TOPS 250 AND WE TOLD THE CAMPAIGN NO
This fight has a local address. The Times reported in September that City Hall runs a Signal group of more than 250 creators, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani's team says more than 1,200 creators have worked with City Hall since he took office. The group grew out of a chat from his campaign. The mayor's office says it does not pay them. Columbia's researchers say proximity to the mayor counts as a form of non-monetary compensation, and that agencies working through outside firms pay $5,000 to $20,000 per influencer campaign. The Campaign Finance Board used an outside firm to pay 18 influencers $626,365 in the 2025 cycle to boost turnout.
We know how the machine recruits because it came to us. Early in Mamdani's campaign, New York Eats Here was approached about becoming a vehicle for his campaign and his agenda. We refused.
WE PULLED 51,960 CITY CAMPAIGN RECORDS AND FOUND ONE PAYMENT LABELED INFLUENCER, FOR $500
We went looking for the food name you want. The reporting from this cycle, from the Times to CalMatters to Columbia, names no food creator taking campaign money. So we pulled the Campaign Finance Board's full 2025 spending file, all 51,960 records. One entry is labeled influencer, a $500 payment. Four others mention a creator or content creation. Mamdani's filings use neither word. His digital money sits under labels like digital advertising.
That file only covers city candidates' own committees. State races, super PACs and anything routed through a vendor live elsewhere, or nowhere you can see. We have no food name to give you, and in this city a false accusation against somebody's livelihood is worth less than nothing.
Nobody should read that as a clean bill of health. Silence from the record clears nobody, and it accuses nobody. It only proves how little the record can tell you.
FOOD CREATORS HOLD THE MOST TRUSTED SEAT IN YOUR PHONE AND CAMPAIGNS PAY FOR SEATS
Nobody opens a food video with their guard up. A pundit announces his agenda before he sits down. The person who sent you to that birria truck in Corona, who told you which Flushing basement was worth the wait, who got you to take your mother to that place on Arthur Avenue, has earned something no ad buy can touch. You spent actual money on their word and it held up. Then you did it again.
That trust belongs to the creators who built it, and to the operators whose rent gets paid when a video lands. An owner on any block in Sunset Park cannot afford to have the account that filled her dining room quietly turn into a campaign's media buy. The next time that account tells her customers something, they need to know whose word they are hearing.
Suzanne Lambert, a progressive creator with over 1.3 million followers who says she has never taken a cent for an endorsement, gave the Times the line that should hang over all of this: "People don't know what's real anymore."
Albany can fix the label. It should. Until it does, the check falls to the people who hold the trust. So we are putting one question to every food account in this city, and it takes one sentence to answer, out loud, on the record: has a campaign ever paid you? We already gave our answer.
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