Wall Street banks and trading firms will soon receive President Donald Trump’s musings within milliseconds, as the parent company of Truth Social announced a new service on Thursday that’s targeted toward paying institutional clients.
Trump Media & Technology Group will launch a licensed data feed, which it’s calling Truth API, to deliver “the fastest access” to posts from the platform’s top 10 most-influential accounts for paying customers. The Sarasota, Florida-based company, which counts the president’s family as its largest shareholders, has already signed up customers ahead of an expected launch of the new service on August 1, according to a statement.
APIs, or application programming interfaces, are a common offering among other social-media platforms like X and Reddit. Hedge funds and other Wall Street firms will pay for these feeds in an effort to gain an edge on market-moving information posted by users before it’s available online, as CNBC noted.
“Markets already move on Truth Social posts,” Kevin McGurn, interim CEO of Trump Media & Technology Group, said in the statement. “Truth API delivers a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths.”
Though the announcement didn’t specifically mention the president, he’s by far the most popular account on Truth Social, with 12.9 million followers. Other members of his administration with large followings and who are frequent posters include Vice President JD Vance, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
A spokesperson for Trump Media & Technology Group didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Fast Company regarding the companies that have already signed up for the service, nor the cost. McGurn told Axios that customers include financial news organizations and high-frequency trading firms, without specifying the names.
Of course, the information is already available, albeit via clunkier—and potentially slower—methods. Firms have been scraping this information for months, which McGurn told Axios is in violation of the company’s terms of service. “We’re going to create a lot of friction for those folks that aren’t coming to us directly,” he told the outlet.
TRUTH SOCIAL UNDER SCRUTINY
Truth Social launched in 2022, and the president’s use of his go-to social media platform has come under scrutiny during his second term. Trump’s overnight posting frenzies will sometimes see him firing off several dozen posts in a matter of hours.
Now that information will be available to Wall Street nearly instantaneously. Truth Social has “become the de facto presidential press room,” as Virginia Canter, an ethics attorney with Democracy Defenders Fund, a nonprofit organization that has been critical of the Trump administration, told CNBC.
Truth Social is frequently the first place that Trump will post about key geopolitical decisions, including about the war with Iran or regarding tariffs. What’s more, he frequently name-drops companies and weighs in on the performance of the stock market.
An investigation by CNN found that the president has promoted more than 20 companies on his Truth Social account—including the likes of Nvidia, U.S. Steel, Eli Lilly, Apple, and Tesla—mere days before he bought shares of those companies. The outlet, however, didn’t find any evidence that Trump has posted about specific companies to boost his portfolio.
TRUTH SOCIAL’S STRUGGLES
Truth Social is intended to be “a safe harbor for free expression amid increasingly harsh censorship by Big Tech corporations,” according to Truth Media. But it has yet to lure people away from other social media platforms, and sees only a fraction of the traffic of competitors.
Facebook led June traffic with more than 9 billion visits, followed by Reddit and X with about 5 billion and 4 billion visits, respectively, according to figures from Semrush, a comprehensive digital marketing and SEO tool suite. By comparison, Truth Social received only 10.5 million visits in June, a 13% decrease from its May traffic, according to Semrush.
What’s more, Truth Media has struggled since its public-market debut in 2021, and the stock is down more than 90% since its all-time high.
By selling faster access to posts from the president and other influential accounts, the company is trying to establish a new, recurring revenue stream. “We expect Truth API to become a meaningful, ongoing source of revenue for the company, creating lasting value for shareholders,” McGurn said.
Even so, the announcement failed to rouse much excitement among investors. Shares of Trump Media fell 0.5% on Thursday amid a broader market decline.
