[Justin Elliott, Robert Faturechi and Alex Mierjeski at ProPublica]

The majority of Donald Trump's net worth is wrapped up in Truth Social's parent company Trump Media & Technology Group. If he's elected, its deals and ownership structure will present conflicts of interests - illustrated by this ProPublica investigation into its streaming TV deal:

"The deal announced by Trump Media involves a series of largely unknown small players. Trump Media’s disclosures about the deal describe a nesting doll of companies that leave many questions unanswered about its new business partners."

"The sellers include a pair of Louisiana companies: [major Republican donor James E.] Davison’s JedTec LLC along with another called WorldConnect IPTV Solutions."

JedTec's issues are relatively straightforward. For me, the bigger mystery surrounds WorldConnect IPTV, which seems to be acting as a wrapper around a UK streaming company called Perception Group. In turn, Perception's servers seem to be colocated with Hurricane Electric, a backbone provider based in Fremont.

Perception seems like a bit of a mystery operation in itself: there's very little information on its website that really illuminates if there's any new technology here at all. WorldConnect, meanwhile, seems to have spent many of its early years helping right-wing Christian TV stations reach audiences across the UK's Freeview over-the-air digital TV service and the internet at large.

It's all super-strange. There's definitely more to discover.

#Democracy

[Link]