Lawsuit seeks to stop Trump charging for early access to his online posts

U.S. President Donald Trump was sued in federal court Wednesday to stop him from making money off a new, paid service at his Truth Social company offering early, exclusive access to his posts on U.S. policy.

The lawsuit alleges the service offering paying customers sneak peeks of his posts about U.S. policy on war, tariffs and other issues violates the Constitution and that official announcements should be made available to everyone at the same time.

The new subscription service rolled out earlier this month is charging Wall Street firms as much as US$100,000 a month to trade off the market-moving posts before others.

“A president selling priority access to news he himself generates for the benefit of a private company he controls is so blatantly corrupt and unconstitutional that it would have been hard to even fathom just a few years ago,” said Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a plaintiff in the case along with news outlet The Intercept.

Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology, said selling fast access to traders is common in its industry, and that the plaintiffs are just trying to silence the president.

“Information from President Trump is disseminated by countless platforms and news outlets, many of which offer subscription APIs,” it said in a statement, using the acronym for the fast access service.

“Now, left wing activists are trying to wrongfully weaponize the courts to censor him again and harm our shareholders.”

The early access service comes as the publicly traded Trump Media loses hundreds of millions of dollars each quarter and its stock has dropped below $10 from $62 shortly after going public two years ago.

The plaintiffs allege the service violates two parts of the Constitution — the First Amendment right to access a president’s comments on equal terms with other members of the press and public and the Fifth Amendment prohibitions on charging unreasonable conditions for government benefits.

The lawsuit asks that Trump Media be forced to end the new paid service, called Truth API, which offers access milliseconds faster.

Trump Media also benefits separately from a deal with Trump that gives its Truth Social six hours of exclusive access to his posts before he can distribute them elsewhere. The plaintiffs appeared to take aim at that, too, asking the court to stop him from “posting official government information exclusively” on his own site.

Trump is the largest shareholder of Trump Media, owning more than 40 per cent of its shares through a trust.

Even before the new API service was started earlier this month, ethics watchdogs criticized Trump’s posting on Truth Social as a brash attempt to profit off the presidency, similar to other money-making ventures, including ones related to cryptocurrencies.