No. of Recommendations: 9
From NPR's Up First, but the reporting is available from other news sites.
For Sale: Early Access to Trump's Truth Social Posts
Some snippets.
President Trump's social media platform, Truth Social, has begun to sell a controversial new service today. For a fee of up to $100,000 a month, Truth Social is offering early access to posts from prominent users, including the president, who uses his post to make announcements about the economy and global affairs.
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Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns Truth Social, is calling this Truth API, and it's being offered to banks and other institutional investors as a way to get a jump on what Trump and others post on Truth Social. Now, Trump's announcements about government policy, conflicts in the Middle East and other developments can send company share prices up or down. So, you know, getting Trump's post, even a few moments faster, could make a difference with stock trading. And I got to say, Scott, this is just a very unusual product for a president to be selling his social media posts, and it's led to a fair amount of concern in Washington and on Wall Street.
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I talked to lawyers who formerly worked at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and they said this service looks like it violates insider trading laws against misusing public information to give certain investors an upper hand. Say the president posts about the Strait of Hormuz, and a trader uses that to make money on oil futures. Democrats, too, have taken notice. They've been criticizing this. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff wrote a letter to the SEC demanding an investigation.
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this service is being pitched to big banks and institutions who are talking about a price tag of over a million dollars a year. This isn't cheap. I reached out to a dozen brokers, hedge fund managers and other investors, and nearly all of them declined to be interviewed. But one high-profile Wall Street executive did talk to me on the condition that he not be named since this person feared retaliation from the Trump administration, and this person called the service, quote, "insane" and said, there's no way, quote, "myself and 200 of my friends in finance will get anywhere near this service since in another administration it would be viewed as criminal."
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recent government disclosures show how Trump earned more than $2 billion last year, mostly from cryptocurrency ventures. And according to legal scholars and historians, that scale of profit while being in the White House is record-breaking, and he has been sharply criticized for, whether it's his Trump meme coin or visits to Mar-a-Lago and his golf courses or this latest Truth Social offering, the president is just finding new and unusual ways of growing his family's wealth while governing the country.
Dope...it's unlikely you will see this reported on FOX 'news' and if it is they will explain why this is perfectly fine. So, you can rest easy in your ignorance.
