President Trump was sued by nonprofit news groups today over Truth Social’s “Truth API” that sells real-time access to posts from Trump and other top users of the social network. Trump is profiting from selling preferential access to government information, the lawsuit said.

Trump’s social media company this month started charging customers up to $100,000 per month for the earliest access to posts that can have immediate impacts on financial markets. The first customers are mostly high-frequency trading firms that could benefit financially from getting official government news milliseconds before others.

“This scheme is profoundly corrupt. The President stands to gain financially by giving ‘market-moving’ government information to those who are willing and able to pay his personal company,” the lawsuit said.

Truth Social also intends to impose restrictions on web scraping tools and make its API the only way to access archived posts that have been deleted or edited, the lawsuit said. The lawsuit was filed by The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which argue that Trump is violating the US Constitution by preventing equal access to government announcements.

“A president selling priority access to news he himself generates for the benefit of a private company he controls is so blatantly corrupt and unconstitutional that it would have been hard to even fathom just a few years ago,” said Seth Stern, the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s chief of advocacy.

Trump “privatizing government information”

The lawsuit was filed in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. It asks the court to declare that posting official government information exclusively on Truth Social while charging for fast access through the API is unconstitutional and unlawful. It seeks an injunction prohibiting the president and aides from posting official government information exclusively on Truth Social as long as the platform maintains the paid API.