President Donald Trump was sued Wednesday over a new service for his social media platform, Truth Social, that charges subscribers up to $100,000 a month for early access to his posts and those of other prominent users.
The lawsuit, filed in Manhattan federal court, alleges that the sale of faster access to what the interim CEO of Truth Social’s parent, Trump Media, has called “market-moving” posts is “profoundly corrupt” and illegal.
“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 lawsuit says, adding, “This scheme is extraordinary, corrupt, and unconstitutional, and Plaintiffs bring this case to stop it.”
The lawsuit, brought by The Intercept Media nonprofit news organization and the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation, says that Trump “stands to gain financially by giving ‘market-moving’ government information to those who are willing and able to pay his personal company.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit by Business Insider.
Last month, Trump Media announced it would launch a service called Truth API, describing it as a business-to-business data feed that would provide customers with faster access to posts from the highest-ranking Truth Social accounts, including Trump, who has 13 million followers.
In Trump Media’s first earnings call on Monday, interim CEO Kevin McGurn said that since the announcement, the company has signed more than 10 customers, “primarily high-frequency trading firms,” at rates ranging from $60,000 to $100,000 to a month.
“We’re also in active conversations with hyperscalers, some of the largest news organizations, and developers of large language models, and we are evaluating opportunities in the prediction market space for data licensing,” McGurn said.
Trump API, the interim CEO explained, “provides a machine-readable feed of publicly available Truth Social posts from the platform’s top accounts in milliseconds.”
Customers will get “published and publicly available posts fractionally faster,” he said.
The lawsuit against Trump slams the service as an “illegal scheme” that violates the First and Fifth Amendments.
“There is no legitimate interest, let alone a significant one, in permitting President Trump to profit from selling government information,” the lawsuit says.
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