A federal judge questioned Wednesday whether he should block President Donald Trump and the White House from posting official announcements on Truth Social when the social media platform is selling early access to his posts.
U.S. District Judge J. Paul Oetken, at a hearing in New York, dove into whether a 50 millisecond head start for corporate clients and high-frequency trading firms who pay up to $100,000 a month for the Truth API feature made enough of a difference for the courts to step in.
“That suggests that whatever the time difference is, it’s valuable,” Oetken said. But he also suggested 50 milliseconds is a “negligible delay to any human.”
And Oetken also asked whether Trump’s ties to Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group, are enough of a connection to justify a preliminary injunction against the White House.
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“There is an extremely close symbiotic relationship that is unusual,” the judge said.
In August, left-leaning news organization The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation sued the president and argued applying a paywall to public statements violates the First Amendment.
David Schulz, an attorney arguing for those plaintiffs, told Oetken that the API feature puts journalists at a disadvantage because they are behind on ways that alert them about Trump’s posts early enough to get to a story first.
The plaintiffs say the president and top aides use the platform to declare military attacks, fire agency heads and announce major domestic policies — communications that frequently rouse market rallies.
“It’s significant enough for people to pay more than $1 million annually to get that information quicker,” Schulz said at the hearing.
Schulz said Trump had “outsourced the White House press office to Truth Social” and the administration had never identified any legitimate government interest in providing better access for those willing to pay.
Brantley Mayers, a Justice Department attorney defending the administration, told the judge that presidents choose their way of communicating with the public, and compared Trump’s social media posts to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats and John F. Kennedy’s televised speeches.
The amount of time between when API subscribers receive an alert and when Trump’s posts are made public — the 50 milliseconds — does not cause significant harm to journalists, Mayers said.
Oetken pressed Mayers on how there hasn’t been anything like this situation, where Truth Social is a private company but Trump is the largest shareholder, has exclusive agreements about use of his image and was described by the CEO as the man “on the other end of the phone”
Mayers said there is no evidence that Trump was involved in the creation of the Truth API. “That’s the missing piece here,” Mayers said.
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