By Rajwa Quasim
President Donald Trump’s social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), is launching a paid service that will give subscribers earlier access to potentially market-moving posts and information, prompting scrutiny over fairness and equal access to such content.
TMTG, which owns Truth Social, announced on July 16 that it is launching “Truth API (Application Programming Interface).” Starting Aug. 1, these big firms and investors will get access to information “in milliseconds,” much faster than regular push notifications that everyday users get from most followed and other influential accounts including Trump himself.
Kevin McGurn, interim chief executive officer of Truth Social’s parent company, TMTG, defended the move, saying, “Markets already move on Truth Social posts.”
READ: Trump Media launches Truth Social data service for businesses (July 16, 2026)
Trump’s posts have moved markets before. Previously, Trump used Truth Social to announce tariffs, comment on the Federal Reserve and share updates on the Iran conflict — posts that affected stock and oil prices. Investors and big firms act on this official information and if an entity gets these notifications even a fraction of second before anyone else, they could make significant profits. The president regularly posts official communications first on Truth Social, making it a closely monitored account for Wall Street firms.
Trump’s own family owns the largest percentage of shares in TMTG. This could also mean that the president might personally benefit from selling faster access to his own posts as he is one of the largest accounts having 12.9 million followers as of July 16. TMTG did not mention the president directly in its statement about the paid service.
Truth Social has “become the de facto presidential press room,” said Virginia Canter, an ethics attorney with Democracy Defenders Fund, a nonprofit organization that has been critical of the Trump administration. 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,” she told Fortune.
Even though other social media networks provide APIs that would benefit hedge funds and Wall Street firms with market-moving information; none of those platforms act as a primary outlet for official posts.
Legal and financial experts raise concerns about equal access to information, which has always been a bedrock principle of U.S. markets. “Milliseconds matter in modern markets, and the president’s social media posts move markets,” Tyler Gellasch, CEO of Healthy Markets Association and former SEC counsel, told Fortune.
READ: Trump Media pitches premium Truth Social data feed (July 19, 2026)
“When you have a market that looks like that, it looks rigged,” he added, implying that this creates a two-tiered market where a handful of connected insiders will have the information.
Parallelly, the SEC is considering a separate change that would let public companies report their earnings semiannual instead of quarterly. Some experts worry that combined with the Truth API, this could make markets rely on private, paid information instead of information that should be available equally to everyone. “Material nonpublic information belongs to the U.S. government or to the American people, not to Truth Social or President Trump,” Renée Jones, the SEC’s former director of corporation finance and a Boston College Law School professor told Fortune.
Some experts also suggest that if the investors find the system unfair, they may shift their investments to a market with stricter disclosure rules (such as Europe).