YouTube agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle a July, 2021 lawsuit by Donald Trump after his account was suspended following the U.S. Capitol riot.
Trump filed class action suits against tech giants Meta and Twitter as well and the CEOs of all three companies for blocking his social media accounts. YouTube/Google parent Alphabet is the last of the three to settle with the president.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta agreed early this year to pay $25 million to settle, with about $22 million going to Trump’s presidential library and the rest to legal fees and other plaintiffs. X (formerly Twitter) agreed to a $10 million settlement.
Google executives were eager to keep their settlement smaller than the one paid by rival Meta, said the WSJ citing people familiar with the matter. It said Trump’s share of the settlement — $22 million — will go towards a new ballroom at the White House. Some $2.5 million will go to the other plaintiffs in the case.
Trump has been raking in cash from legal settlements from tech and media companies. That includes $16 million from Paramount in July during a federal review of the company’s merger with Skydance, and the same amount from Disney in January. He had sued Paramount over an interview with Kamala Harris by CBS’ 60 Minutes, and took Disney and ABC News to court for defamation for comments by anchor George Stephanopoulos.
MORE
