Trump faces legal battle over sale of early Truth Social access

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump was sued by a media outlet and an advocacy coalition that requested a temporary pause on a service’s operations that sells advance notifications of his posts on Truth Social.

The lawsuit filed in the US District Court in Manhattan found that Trump’s posts on his own social media site often move financial markets' regarding significant announcement policy, military actions and other key decisions.

The complaint asserts that the new service known as Truth API violates the First and Fifth Amendments of the US Constitution by giving subscribers exclusive access to Trump’s public announcements for unreasonable sums. 

The statement from the civil suit reads: “President Donald Trump is charging $100,000 per month for advance access to his official government announcements on Truth Social, the social media platform he owns,” the civil suit says.

“This scheme is extraordinary, corrupt, and unconstitutional, and Plaintiffs bring this case to stop it,”

“There is no legitimate interest, let alone a significant one, in permitting President Trump to profit from selling government information.”

Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media primarily announced in July that it would offer subscribers paying up to $100,000 real-time financial data feed posts from Trump and other platform users.

It is crucial to note that Trump is the largest shareholder in Trump’s Media through Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust.

In this connection, Trump Media CEO Kevin McGurn said Truth API provides syndication feeds of publicly available Truth posts from the platform’s prominent accounts in milliseconds.

He said: “Our customers will get published and publicly available posts fractionally faster.”

McGurn also asserted during the call that Trump Media till date had signed more than 10 customer agreements for Truth API, typically in the range of $60,000-$100,000 a month.

Nonetheless, McGurn maintained that the company was in a lively debate with hyperscalers, and some large news organizations, and language model developers.