A new product will effectively allow Trump's company to sell early access to the president's market-moving posts
Alex Brandon/AP Photo/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Trump Media & Technology Group announced on Thursday a paid data feed that will give financial firms real-time access to posts from Truth Social's most-followed accounts — including President Donald Trump's. The product will effectively allow Trump's company to sell early access to the president's market-moving posts.
The product, called Truth API, will grant licensed access to real-time posts from the platform's top 10 trending accounts, pushing content to subscribers within milliseconds, the company said. The service is scheduled to launch Aug. 1, and Trump Media said it has already signed up customers ahead of that date, including financial news organizations and high-frequency trading firms, according to Axios.
"Markets already move on Truth Social posts," interim CEO Kevin McGurn said in a statement. "Truth API delivers a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform's most market-moving Truths while advancing our strategy to monetize proprietary assets through a high-margin, recurring revenue stream."
Other social networks, including X $TWTR and Reddit $RDDT, also sell data access to enterprise clients. But the announcement drew conflict-of-interest concerns. "The president has an obligation to the American people to convey information to them publicly, and he's now funneling it through a private channel in which he has a private interest as one of its largest shareholders," Virginia Canter, an ethics attorney with Democracy Defenders Fund, told CNBC.
Trump received roughly 114 million Trump Media shares — representing about 42% of the company — and upon taking the presidency placed them in a revocable trust held under his son Donald Trump Jr.'s name Shares of Trump Media gained 0.6% on Thursday, though they remain approximately 27% lower for the year.
The accounts covered by the feed include Trump's @realDonaldTrump, the @WhiteHouse account, FBI Director Kash Patel, White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The company said the feed will operate around the clock and include a historical archive of posts dating to 2022.
Trump Media said Truth Social had never offered an official API before, leaving firms that tracked influential posts dependent on workarounds such as manual monitoring. McGurn told Axios that certain firms had spent months pulling Truth Social data without authorization, frequently running afoul of its terms of service, and argued that the official feed would outpace anything scraped from the platform.
The API represents the company's first data-licensing product and is intended to create a recurring revenue stream, the company said. McGurn also told Axios that Trump Media is in discussions to license Truth Social data to artificial intelligence companies for large language model training. No pricing for Truth API was available, according to CNN.
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