Five years after the deplatforming of Donald Trump by Silicon Valley giants, the president's own social media venture, Truth Social, is turning the tables on the established media order. The company has introduced a new API service—Truth API—that provides institutional clients with machine-speed access to posts from the platform's top accounts, including the president's own.
A New Frontier in Presidential Communication
Truth Social, launched in February 2022 when Trump was a private citizen with dim political prospects. The new API, priced at reportedly $60,000 to $100,000 per month, offers banks and Wall Street investors a fraction-of-a-second head start on the president's statements—a potential goldmine for market movers. Critics, including Senators Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren, have complained to the SEC, framing the service as a potential conflict of interest.
Yet, as the First Things analysis notes, the practice of monetizing privileged access to newsmakers is hardly novel. Michael Bloomberg built an empire on delivering lightning-fast financial data to elite clients. Politico and the Washington Post sell business intelligence to subscribers. The White House press corps itself is a select group of for-profit media organizations with inside access. The difference is that Truth Social is owned by the president himself.
Trump moving media to private sector
The underlying issue is not new: the relationship between private media and public information. For generations, traditional media have acted as gatekeepers, filtering and framing presidential communications, often advancing a partisan liberal agenda. Conservatives built Fox News in response, but even that was a filter. Trump's direct-to-people approach, via his own platform, bypasses these gatekeepers entirely.
The profit motive is secondary. Truth Social is still money-losing, and the president's gain is a byproduct of his public service, not its aim. The real story is the democratization of presidential communication—or, more accurately, the shift of that communication from legacy media's control to the president's own. The media's outrage is less about ethics than about losing their privileged position.
Šaltinis: First Things — https://firstthings.com/the-truth-about-truth-api/
Comments
Comments are moderated. Be civil — disagreement is welcome, abuse is not.