For decades, U.S. markets have sold themselves to the world on a simple promise: Though investors may not be equal in size, they get the same core facts. But two new developments are testing how much that transparency promise still holds.
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President Donald Trump’s media company announced on Thursday that it would sell millisecond-faster access to potentially market-moving Truth Social posts to investors. The product, Truth API, is arriving just as the SEC considers letting companies move from quarterly to semiannual disclosures, raising concerns that U.S. markets could become more dependent on private, paid information streams while offering ordinary investors fewer regular public filings.
“Markets already move on Truth Social posts,” said Kevin McGurn, Interim Chief Executive Officer of Truth Social’s parent company TMTG, in a statement.
At risk here, three securities law experts told Fortune, is whether the key markers of a fair market, like transparent, timely, and comparable information, are being chipped away.
“Milliseconds matter in modern markets, and the president’s social media posts move markets,” Tyler Gellasch, CEO of Healthy Markets Association and former SEC counsel, told Fortune. While the statement did not specifically mention whether the president’s posts will be included, it did make reference to top social posts. With 12.9 million followers, the president is the most popular user of Truth Social. His sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and the White House also have several million followers.
Gellasch said this Truth API results in “a two-tiered market where a handful of connected insiders will have the information” and everyone else doesn’t, undermining the core principle of U.S. markets to provide fair access to information.
“When you have a market that looks like that, it looks rigged,” Gellasch said.
Renée Jones, the SEC’s former director of corporation finance and a Boston College Law School professor, said the Truth API could be clashing with securities law, especially since Trump, as the publicly traded parent company’s biggest shareholder, will be profiting from the platform.
“Material nonpublic information belongs to the U.S. government or to the American people, not to Truth Social or President Trump,” Jones told Fortune.
An asymmetry of investing
Truth API is set to roll out on August 1, the statement read. This comes just as the SEC begins weighing the option of letting companies move to semiannual reporting instead of quarterly.
Chester Spatt, Carnegie Mellon professor and former chief economist at the SEC, drew the contrast between the two developments. Semiannual reporting, in his view, doesn’t create real winners and losers among investors—everyone still gets the same numbers, eventually. But Truth Social does.
“I’m more worried about the asymmetry in the case of the Truth Social posts than I am about the semiannual reporting,” he told Fortune.
Jones agreed, saying the disclosure system exists precisely to keep investors on equal footing, and that loosening it, even on a voluntary basis, threatens that. She likened the moment to Enron and WorldCom, when accounting scandals gutted stock prices and confidence in U.S. markets broadly.
“If investors think the system’s rigged, they’re less likely to invest in the securities markets,” she said. “If investors lose confidence, in particular in the integrity of the U.S. markets, they might move their capital elsewhere.”
Gellasch already sees that shift starting toward markets with more robust disclosure rules and potentially away from the U.S.
“I expect investors will slowly start to shift their focus to other markets, and particularly European markets,” he said. Left unaddressed, he warned, “it really does threaten the American competitive advantage in the capital market.”
A fast moving market already
Spatt told Fortune that the issue of Truth API isn’t that it’s selling faster access to information (something he pointed out the Bloomberg Terminal already does), but it lies in who is capturing the profits, in this case being the Trump-owned media company.
With Truth Social, the president’s decisions could be monetized through a platform he owns, blurring whether these communications are personal property, government property or a private asset leveraged for profit. Truth Social’s parent company has racked up losses over the years, most recently a $405.9 million net loss in the first quarter of 2026 alone.
This isn’t the first time experts raised issues with Trump monetizing his presidential office. His financial disclosures released earlier this month show he earned $2.2 billion in 2025, with more than half coming from crypto assets. Nor is it the first time he’s made market-moving posts. He announced the “Liberation Day” tariffs on Truth Social, and has used the platform to promote and defend the tariff agenda.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com