YouTube, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, has agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit filed by US President Donald Trump after the platform suspended his account following the Capitol attack on 6 January, 2021.
According to court filings from Monday, $22 million of the settlement will be allocated for Trump’s contribution to the Trust for the National Mall and the construction of a White House ballroom. The remaining $2.5 million will be distributed to other parties involved in the case, including writer Naomi Wolf and the American Conservative Union.
This settlement with Alphabet marks the third major technology company to settle lawsuits that Trump filed, accusing them of unfairly restricting his speech after his first term as president ended.
Similar lawsuits against Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms and Twitter (now rebranded as X) also resulted in settlements. Meta agreed to a $25 million payment, while Twitter settled for $10 million.
When these lawsuits were filed, many legal experts believed Trump had little chance of success. Following Twitter’s acquisition by Elon Musk for $44.5 billion, Musk became a significant backer of Trump’s 2024 re-election campaign. Musk spent several months leading a cost-cutting effort that purged thousands of workers from the federal government payroll before the he had a bitter falling out with Trump.
Both Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg were among the tech leaders who lined up behind Trump during his second inauguration in January in a show of solidarity that was widely interpreted as a sign of the industry’s intention to work more closely with the president than during his first administration.
Although the settlement does not acknowledge liability, Google confirmed the deal but chose not to comment further. Trump’s YouTube account has been restored since 2023.
Given Alphabet’s market value of almost $3 trillion, the settlement’s financial impact is minimal, especially with Alphabet’s market capitalisation growing by approximately $600 billion, or 25%, since Trump’s return to the White House.
The announcement of the settlement came just a week before a scheduled court hearing on 6 October with US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers in Oakland, California.
