BOSTON — New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani — a socialist Democrat with politics nearly identical to Mayor Michelle Wu’s — is heading to the White House on Friday for a face-to-face meeting with Donald Trump. And whether you agree with Mamdani or not, the move reveals something glaring about Boston’s mayor:

Mamdani is willing to sit down with someone he fiercely opposes. Mayor Wu won’t even sit down with her own critics.

The contrast isn’t about ideology. Mamdani and Wu are cut from the same progressive cloth. The contrast is about courage — and who’s willing to confront opposition instead of silencing it.

While the NYC mayor-elect prepares to sit down with the federal administration to discuss real issues, Wu continues to operate in a bubble where any disagreement is treated like a personal attack. In Boston, critics at her events have been escorted out, shouted down, or arrested. Online, the rest are blocked.

And Instagram has become Wu’s favorite tool for digital damage control.

Wu aggressively uses the platform’s “Restrict” feature — a setting that quietly hides comments from users she labels as “bad actors,” making their posts invisible to the public unless she manually approves them. It’s a censorship tool dressed up as “safety,” and it allows her to curate her page like a museum exhibit: polished, sanitized, and criticism-free.

But she can’t control Facebook that way.

And the difference is brutal.

On Facebook, where the “Restrict” feature doesn’t exist and comment control is far more limited, Wu’s posts routinely fill with overwhelmingly negative reactions — hundreds of unfiltered criticisms from residents who finally have a place where their comments can’t be auto-hidden, throttled, or quietly disappeared.

It’s the one platform where she can’t press a button to make the backlash vanish.

And when Wu’s internal team realized X was no longer a safe space — with replies, quote-tweets, and criticism impossible to contain — she fled the platform entirely and resurfaced on the quieter, friendlier Bluesky.

Earlier this year, Mass Daily News contacted the Mayor’s Office about her widespread use of Instagram restrictions and the hiding of critical comments on public posts. Wu’s office did not respond.

Meanwhile, Mamdani — someone with nearly the same political ideology — is preparing to confront his opposition directly at the White House. Not because he agrees with Trump, but because he is willing to show up.

And that’s where Boston pays the price. A meeting with Trump could bring real benefits to the city — federal funding, infrastructure support, coordination on public safety, even cooperation on deporting violent criminal illegal immigrants. Cities across America negotiate with Washington regardless of who’s in the Oval Office because it’s their job. But Wu won’t — and everyone knows why. She’s positioning herself for higher office, and picking a public fight with Trump helps her brand more than helping Boston would. It’s political theater at the city’s expense, a choice that puts ambition over outcomes.

Boston’s mayor won’t even confront opposing viewpoints from her own constituents.

You don’t have to admire Mamdani or his platform to see the point: He’s walking into the room. Wu, critics say, won’t even walk into a comments section — unless she can delete half the room first.