The August 12th The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation have filed an appeal in the federal court for the Southern District of New York Donald Trump For Truth APIthe service through which Truth Social sells early access to the president’s posts. The two organizations ask judges to declare illegitimate the combination of two behaviors: publishing official government announcements only on Truth Social and charging to receive them before everyone else.
The service, announced at Julydelivers messages in machine-readable format with a latency of a few milliseconds. Prices range from 60,000 to 100,000 dollars a month and the first customers are prevalent high frequency trading company. On that account Trump exclusively announces military attacks and ceasefires, appointments and dismissals at the top of federal agencies, internal political decisions: news that moves the markets the moment they appear.
In the call on the quarterly results the interim CEO Kevin McGurn He said there are already more than ten subscribers and that the company is in talks with cloud computing providers, large news organizations and large language model developers. Looking ahead, he added, Truth API will also be opened to small investors.
The constitutional arguments
The First Amendmentthe plaintiffs argue, ensures equal access to the president’s public announcements, and even a content-neutral charge must be calibrated to significant public interest. “There is no legitimate, much less significant, interest in allowing President Trump to profit from the sale of government information,” the filing reads. The Fifth Amendmentthe appeal continues, prohibits imposing unreasonable and unjustifiable sums to cover the cost of the service, and granting preferential access to crucial public information for arbitrary reasons.
The executive assistant is mentioned along with Trump Natalie Harp and the deputy chief of staff Daniel Scavinowho have access to the account and publish on its behalf, as well as the Executive Office of the President and the White House Office. The request is an injunction that prohibits the president and his aides from disseminating official information exclusively on Truth Social as long as the platform maintains the paid API.
“A president who sells priority access to news he generates for the benefit of a private company he controls is so openly corrupt and unconstitutional that it would have been difficult to even imagine just a few years ago,” he said. Seth Sternresponsible for the advocacy activity of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, who recalls how Trump uses the same account to attack journalists and to announce complaints and criminal investigations against them, only to then make them wait in line behind paying customers.
The archive behind the subscription
Truth Social also intends to limit scraping tools and make the API the only way to consult the deleted or modified postsclaims the appeal, which quotes a phrase from McGurn himself: “We will create a lot of friction for those who do not contact us directly”. For the two appellants the damage is twofold, an indefinite delay on the most recent messages and a permanent barrier on archived ones, and affects the daily work of both editorial teams.
Trump Media ended the second quarter with 1.7 million dollars of revenues and a net loss of 238.1 millionof which 190.4 million of non-monetary items linked to write-downs on digital assets and shares. Early access to the president’s posts appears to be one of the few commodities that only that company can sell, and in the launch statement the company wrote that markets already move on posts published on the platform.
The link between the company and the occupant of the White House is direct: after the 2024 election, Trump’s shares passed to a trust of which he is the sole beneficiary, with his son Donald Trump Jr. as sole trustee, and an agreement cited in the appeal generally obliges him to publish his messages on Truth Social, without replicating them elsewhere for six hours. In the meantime, paid access remains active and the court has not yet ruled.
