Truth Social’s Parent Company Sues 20 Media Outlets
Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), the parent group of former President Donald Trump’s social media platform Truth Social, has filed a lawsuit against 20 left-wing media outlets that reported false information about the company’s finances.
The civil lawsuit seeking $1.5 billion was filed on Monday in the Sarasota County, Florida Circuit Court. The social media company is suing 20 media outlets, including Reuters, Rolling Stone, The Hill, Forbes Media, Axios Media, New York Daily News, MSNBC and the Daily Mail.
The social media platform released a statement about the lawsuit on Monday.
“Today, Truth Social filed a defamation lawsuit that is likely unprecedented in history, incorporating twenty publications – and even more may be added. All of them published the same false information about Truth Social and refused to fully retract their stories,” the statement posted to Truth Social read. “To the Fake News outlets that think themselves above accountability: we’ll see you in court.”
In the lawsuit, TMTG accuses these news outlets of an “unprecedented and seemingly coordinated media campaign” designed “to attack Trump Media & Technology Group” and Truth Social “by falsely reporting that TMTG had lost $73 million.”
As TMTG notes in the lawsuit, the number is “an utter fabrication.” Each of these outlets cited SEC data in reporting this statistic, yet the number appears nowhere in the SEC filing that they cite.
“Each defendant, in apparent coordination, reported the exact same false number within approximately 24 hours of one another, each citing to a public Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) filing, in which the mystery $73 million appears nowhere,” the lawsuit explains.
“This was a coordinated effort to damage TMTG’s reputation, degrade the firm’s financial standing, freeze its access to capital, and torpedo the anticipated merger between Digital World Acquisition Corporation (‘DWAC’) and TMTG,” the lawsuit alleges.
TMTG goes on to explain that they had “publicly” touted the SEC filing as “good news” — noting that it “marked a major milestone toward the completion of the planned merger between DWAC and TMTG.”
Despite this, the left-wing media outlets “published false financial information” — which TMTG asserts was done to try to smear the company.
“Because this filing involves TMTG and President Trump’s Truth Social, however, these defendants ignored or downplayed TMTG’s public statements regarding a positive development. Instead, they deliberately or recklessly published false financial information to advance a preferred and coordinated narrative harmful to TMTG,” the lawsuit states, adding: “All defendants ran nearly identical headlines that reported some variation of ‘Trump’s Truth Social’ having lost ‘$73 million.’”
TMTG also noted in the lawsuit that the company had contacted each of the media outlets and notified them of the “error,” pointing out that the false number being reported was defamatory and demanding a retraction and apology from each outlet.
“To date, while some defendants have issued little-noticed ‘corrections’ or ‘updates,’ none have retracted the defamatory articles, publicly apologized, or taken any other steps to ameliorate the continuing damage,” the lawsuit claims.
