> The new commercial data feed, named Truth API, promises to deliver posts to paying institutional clients in "milliseconds".

...

> The company, which launched its social media app in 2022, said some firms have been copying its data for months without permission.

> McGurn warned that Trump Media will soon block these methods, forcing firms to buy the official feed instead.

This looks like it is monetizing and organizing scrapers. Isn't basically everyone doing this with data feeds these days?

At best this just gives a few milliseconds head start to subscribers and cracks down on automation. I would be shocked if NYSE, etc. don't already have premium tiers with faster market data and those feeds are certainly paid APIs. It's known that HFT shops will co-locate, for example, to have low latency.

This looks really bad, but if it were X and not Truth Social, there wouldn't be anything to see. It goes to the underlying issue of Trump owning and trying to profit from Truth Social generally.

There is literally nothing else of value on Truth Social except the president's posts. And those are considered official government communications. There's a legal ruling about that from the time of the first Trump administration.

So the US president has created a wrapper corporation that sells early access to official government communications. It doesn't matter if it's only milliseconds, that's enough for trading systems to make money.

How can any of this be legal in a democracy?