The Truth About Truth API

Five years ago, the most powerful media companies in the world—Facebook and Twitter, as it was then called—chose to deplatform Donald Trump. They cited public safety concerns following the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. But their action was also a heavy-handed intervention in American democracy, the closest thing possible, in our political system, to the outright bans on right-wing populist parties that certain European countries impose.

Trump, of course, did not go away. He started his own social media company, Truth Social, and even after Facebook relented and Twitter was bought by Elon Musk and rechristened “X,” he has continued to favor his own platform. When Trump began Truth Social in February 2022, he was a private citizen whose prospects of ever returning to the White House seemed dim, to say the least.

But the American people did elect Trump again, despite the judgment new media and old had passed against him. And so Truth Social became a social media company owned by a sitting president. (The full details of ownership are complex, involving a trust and Donald Trump Jr. as well as Trump himself.) Trump uses the site the way he once used Twitter, venting his views on every subject and indicating moves he might make as president along the way.

Truth Social is now making a new Application Programming Interface, or API, available to high-paying customers. Truth API provides a machine-readable feed of Truth posts from the platform’s top accounts—including the president’s—in milliseconds. Banks and Wall Street investors who are prepared to pay will get news from the president fractionally faster than the rest of us, which can in fact translate into huge advantages in market transactions. Democrats are crying foul—Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren wrote a joint letter complaining to the Securities and Exchange Commission—and many media outlets are reporting the story along the lines the opposition has set down.

Media outlets themselves, however, already engage in much the same kind of activity. Michael Bloomberg’s media empire was built on supplying lightning-fast information to top-dollar clients. Publications like Politico and the Washington Post also sell privileged access to business-related intelligence. Of course, these media outlets aren’t making the news themselves—although sometimes they are, in reality, even if they don’t directly make policy.

Presidents do directly make policy, but their market-relevant news-making has been privatized and monetized long before now. Whenever a president or other high official granted an exclusive interview to the New York Times or Newsweek, those publications were receiving something valuable to sell to their paying customers. The fact that only certain news media have a place in the White House press corps or get in-person access to other government briefings also amounts to channeling information created by public officials into (typically) for-profit private organizations. Unsurprisingly, this has contributed to the enormous power these media organizations have acquired: power to command attention, shape public perception, and greatly influence politics.

If Trump were still on X, Elon Musk would be reaping the benefit of earliest access to the president’s words. Instead, the media company owned by the man whom the public elected president—in full knowledge that he owned this company—gets the benefit. This was already the case before the new API offering: People who pay to join Truth Social as ordinary members get to see the president’s posts there before those who aren’t on the social network. What he writes gets quickly relayed to X and other media, but those who have a stake in being the first to know already have to subscribe. Now the company is making the data available at higher speeds that only machines can process, and institutions that have a use for such speed are willing to pay handsomely for it: perhaps even $60,000 or $100,000 a month, the asking prices various media have reported.

“The new offering mirrors similar paid data services available on competing social media platforms,” The Guardian notes, although Truth API has “a particularly steep price tag.” The speed and the cost of the feed are new. But the underlying questions are not, and they have to do not only with whether the president is personally profiting from his public office but with the relationship between private media and public information.

A president whose financial assets are in a blind trust will almost certainly profit along with everyone else if his policies foster prosperity for the country. In that scenario, he would be enriching himself only as a byproduct of his public work. As long as President Trump isn’t tailoring his words or policies to sell Truth subscriptions, the profit the network makes from hosting his account is innocent—after all, Trump had accounts elsewhere that he used the same way until he was banned, and the owners of those services profited from his presence on their networks, just as old-fashioned media have always profited from their privileged access to newsmakers.

The American republic differs from its classical models in that we accept a much greater role for private institutions in public life. Many of these private institutions, including the traditional media, come to think of themselves as possessing public authority, though they lack the popular consent that is supposed to be all-important in a modern democratic republic. For generations, the private media that have acted as filters and gatekeepers of information emanating from public officials have used their advantaged position to advocate a partisan, liberal agenda. Conservatives have responded by building partisan media of their own, notably the Fox News Channel. (By “partisan” I don’t just mean party-aligned, but ideologically partisan.) 

But Trump has sidestepped even friendly partisan media by communicating directly with the American people on a media platform of his own. He didn’t do it out of pecuniary motives; he was forced to do it, and the only reason he stands to make money from his platform—which in fact is still money-losing and may remain so even with Truth API—is because the American public made him president again. He’s profiting from their choices more than any of his own.

Image by usarmyband, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.