People are obsessed with Mayor Daniel Lurie's Instagram. But will it actually help S.F.?
It's 8 o'clock on a Thursday morning, and San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie is standing in front of me in his shirtsleeves, recording himself on an iPhone he's holding at arm's length.
'All right, everybody, it's Bike to Work Day!' he exclaims, grinning. 'You're going to be seeing a lot of me in this,' he adds, holding his bike helmet up to the camera.
Nearby, a handful of Lurie staffers wait astride their own bikes, while his security detail sits impassively in a Rivian SUV. Meanwhile, a small crowd of kids on their way to school stops to watch with curiosity as the most powerful man in San Francisco transforms himself into a creature they're eminently familiar with: the social media influencer.
To those unfamiliar with Lurie's digital presence, the idea of our mayor taking time out of his day to record selfie videos doubtlessly sounds cringe-inducing. I certainly found it surreal to witness in person.
But video communiqués like this have become a central facet of his administration.
Lurie is inescapable on Instagram, where his team posts a relentless barrage of photos and videos following him around the city. One moment, he's walking and talking somberly about the chaotic conditions he just witnessed on Market Street. Next, he's ordering a strawberry matcha boba at a cafe in Chinatown. He even breaks news on Instagram — such as announcing plans to bring Dead & Company to San Francisco for a three-day concert.
Well, sure. But he and his team also recognize that in the digital age, images and videos can not only launch or destroy political careers — they can determine the trajectory of a city's future.
Is San Francisco in a 'doom loop' or a 'boom loop'?
Like it or not, recent history shows most people aren't looking for the answer to that question in objective data. Rather, they're basing it on the city's vibes.
Of course, understanding the importance of vibes and shaping them on social media are two different beasts. The idea of just about any politician finding success through selfie videos seems implausible for anyone other than a young, telegenic figure like AOC.
Yet Lurie is somehow pulling it off.
Based on data shared with me on May 15, his Instagram posts had been viewed by nearly 1.9 million accounts in the prior 30 days — an astonishing 147% increase from the previous month. Only about half of those accounts already followed Lurie — meaning his page is reaching a significant number of people who may not be familiar with him. When he was elected in November, Lurie had about 3,500 followers on Instagram. On May 24, he hit 100,000.
Lurie's team says this growth was achieved organically; since the election, they haven't paid for posts to be promoted.
Ask around town, and it's clear that no promotion is needed.
'I am obsessed with the mayor's Instagram,' Rich Lee, the co-founder of Spro Coffee Lab, a popular San Francisco cafe, told me.
'I obsessively watch his social media,' said Amy Cleary, director of public policy and media relations for the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, adding that Lurie's pop-ins at local restaurants have been a boon for businesses.
'Daniel Lurie is killing the comms game tbh,' a digital media specialist wrote in an X post that received nearly 800 likes. 'Posting short videos to Reels every day, announcing every little thing the admin is doing. it's all format-native and not overproduced.'
How did Lurie, who by his own admission is no natural in front of the camera, become such an Instagram sensation? And what does that signify about the future of our politics — and the importance of perception in turning around San Francisco's fate?
To find out, I shadowed Lurie and key members of his communications team for about 12 hours earlier this month, starting with the mayor's morning bike ride to City Hall.
If there's a through line in Lurie's videos, it's in his earnest dad vibes.
'I am fired up,' Lurie proclaims in a May 9 Instagram reel shot in Golden Gate Park's Kezar Stadium, grinning with excitement while jabbing his finger as if punctuating his words with exclamation marks. ' San Francisco is getting a new pro soccer team!'
The mayor's cadence is halting and slightly awkward, as it is in most videos. But Lurie's team isn't trying to make him into something he's not with editing. Instead, they show the mayor being himself, out and about, instead of reading scripted remarks from a staged backdrop — the milieu in which most people engage with politicians.
Ensuring the mayor's message falls on the endearing side of corny is the responsibility of his communications team — the majority of whom also worked on his mayoral campaign.
Deputy Communications Director Annie Scudder Gabillet, 40, is the mastermind who oversees the office's proactive planning and social media strategy. She works closely with Haakon Black, 23, a communications and digital assistant who handles much of Lurie's speech writing, and Sophia Robles-Mendoza, 24, a digital communications manager who handles day-to-day online updates. During the campaign, Gabillet was Lurie's digital director and Black his digital assistant, driver and ' body man ' — a close aide who follows a politician around the clock to provide logistical support. Lurie's current body man is Fernando Villarreal, 23, who was a field organizer for the campaign. Because Villarreal is the only non-security staffer who goes with Lurie everywhere, he inevitably plays a role in Lurie's social presence.
They're a tight unit — a vault of inside jokes and playful ribbing.
'Everyone thinks he's my son, wherever we go,' Lurie said of Villarreal, who still has the baby face of a high-school student. He added that 'for months,' even the sheriff's deputies at City Hall thought Villarreal was his kid, drawing laughs from staffers.
This casual, familiar repartee between Lurie and his staffers is reflected in his social media, which comes across as accessible and relatable. The mayor isn't a distant authority figure; he plays video games and shares what he ate for lunch, and posts with the frequency of a friend on a dream vacation.
'For some people, this is the only (way) that they will engage,' Lurie told me. 'We've got to meet them where they're at.'
As if performing a subtle face-lift, Lurie's team shapes and tweaks his raw video footage to make it interesting enough to pop on social media — where infinite streams of content are competing for viewers' attention. The team adds text and multimedia elements, using fonts and songs native to Instagram and TikTok's respective libraries so the videos look and feel natural on those platforms.
It's a smart political strategy: Too often, people lose faith in their elected officials because they aren't effectively communicating what they're doing.
Lurie, on the other hand, seems to be everywhere at once, including restaurants across the city where he stops for lunch or coffee.
Unsurprisingly, this has proved popular with small businesses. Lee, of Spro Coffee Lab, said Lurie's Instagram account is evidence he's 'boots on the ground.' Cleary, of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, said she was impressed by Lurie showing up at 'small places in the Excelsior that even I didn't know about.'
She added, 'That's really nice for the neighbors and for the businesses — the mayor knows we exist. The mayor cares.'
At Jane on Larkin cafe, where Lurie stopped for lunch the day I shadowed him, Lurie told me restaurants are now calling his office and asking him to film there, which he's done a few times.
'These restaurants, these small businesses, they deserve our support. I want to be a cheerleader. … I am going to tell people how great our city is.'
At the same time, he added, 'I also don't want to sugarcoat it. We have real challenges.'
How do you go about boosting the city you love while also being honest about the problems it faces?
It's a tightrope that all big city mayors have to traverse. But that balance is especially fraught in San Francisco — where scenes of drug addiction and homelessness have played out before an international audience and given legs to warning tales of Democratic governance.
While images of civic disorder can help motivate a sense of political urgency, they can also scare away the workers, small businesses and private investments the city needs to turn things around. Yet pretending those problems don't exist only breeds resentment and frustration among residents who have to deal with them each day.
Lurie's Instagram account is honest that things in San Francisco aren't all sunshine and rainbows. I watched Gabillet film a quick video outside Jane on Larkin, where the mayor mentioned the importance of cleaning up the troubled alleyway next to the restaurant.
Yet there are limits to what Lurie is willing to show.
Midway through my day with him, I watched the mayor read 'nice emails' about police officers for a recurring video segment honoring city workers. As he sat at his City Hall desk, a tripod-mounted iPhone in front of him, Lurie read from a stack of note cards his staffers had given him.
'Yesterday, a friend and I were having coffee outside Peet's at Broderick Street when a belligerent man carried his disturbance of the peace from inside the building to our table. (An officer) very calmly persuaded him to leave the premises.'
Lurie paused before reluctantly reading the next sentence. 'The man then punched a car, causing damage, and ran.'
The mayor stopped and exhaled.
'I'm not sure if we like this,' he said, laughing awkwardly.
His staffers quickly said he didn't have to use it, and Lurie relaxed and moved on to the next email about police officers helping a homeless man fix his broken wheelchair.
But this tension between candor and boosterism surfaced very publicly just days later in a way Lurie couldn't control — when a citizen documentarian known for posting disturbing scenes of drug use and homelessness in San Francisco confronted him.
In a video posted on X, 'JJ Smith,' as the videographer calls himself, approaches Lurie on the street and shows him footage of a mother trying to shield her child from chaotic conditions on 16th and Mission streets.
Visibly frustrated, Lurie responds, 'You don't have to tell me — I'm there every day!'
He adds, 'Let me just say one thing about you doing the videos and pushing them out … it also kills our economy. Think about it.'
When I connected with Smith last week, he told me he was frustrated by the mayor's reaction: 'You can't fix a problem if you sweep it under the rug.'
Yet it's clear the mayor isn't blind to these circumstances. Multiple times during my day with him, Lurie knelt down to ask homeless people in crisis for their names and if they were interested in shelter and services. Those encounters weren't filmed, but bystanders have posted similar videos of him across social media.
It's difficult to dispute Lurie's contention that the near-constant stream of images and videos depicting San Francisco as a hotbed of urban disorder has negatively affected the city. He believes in the power of reinforcement: Positivity begets positivity; negativity begets negativity.
'My job as mayor is to make sure that everybody knows how great our city is,' Lurie told me. 'And I'm just telling the truth. … The city is doing better. It's on the rise.'
This could easily be dismissed as unserious boosterism. But the growing number of Lurie's social-media followers suggests San Franciscans aren't mad about it.
After years of pandemic struggles and being dragged through the national mud, residents are tired of feeling like their beloved, beautiful city is being unfairly maligned. They're tired of the city being defined by its challenges.
They want a comeback story.
Lurie has found success in giving it to them — one Instagram post at a time.
Elena Kadvany contributed reporting.
Emily Hoeven is a columnist and editorial writer for the Opinion section.
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