This is a couple of days old but I missed it and I know you did too because you wouldn't cheat on this site.
Google's YouTube has agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit President Donald Trump brought after the video site suspended his account following the Jan. 6, 2021 attacks on the Capitol following the election that resulted in him leaving the White House for four years.
The settlement of the more than four-year-old case earmarks $22 million for Trump to contribute to the Trust for the National Mall and a construction of a White House ballroom, according to court documents filed Monday. The remaining $2.5 million will be paid to other parties involved in the case, including the writer Naomi Wolf and the American Conservative Union.
Alphabet, the parent of Google, is the third major technology company to settle a volley of lawsuits that Trump brought for what he alleged had unfairly muzzled him after his first term as president ended in January 2021. He filed similar cases Facebook parent Meta Platforms and Twitter before it was bought by billionaire Elon Musk in 2022 and rebranded as X.
Meta agreed to pay $25 million to settle Trumps' lawsuit over his 2021 suspension from Facebook and X agreed to settle the lawsuit that Trump brought against Twitter for $10 million. When the lawsuits against Meta. Twitter and YouTube were filed, legal experts predicted Trump had little chance of prevailing.
Just as Jake Tapper was claiming that the three-day suspension of Jimmy Kimmel was the greatest assault on speech in human history, Google/YouTube admitted that it had banned accounts presenting perfectly legal -- and, in fact, perfectly true -- facts about covid and the non-vaccinating vaccines. (Apparently Jake Tapper doesn't watch the news. Or else he's just a hack lifelong Democrat activist. You choose.)
Too little, too late, says Wendi Strauch Mahoney at American Thinker.
Google and its parent company Alphabet Inc. finally put in writing what many have suspected for years: Senior Biden-era officials "conducted repeated and sustained outreach" to the company and pressed YouTube to remove COVID-related videos that did not violate YouTube's policies.
In a Sep. 23 letter to House Judiciary chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Alphabet's counsel called such government attempts to dictate moderation "unacceptable and wrong" and said YouTube will create a pathway for creators banned under now-retired COVID-19 and 2020/2024 election policies to return. Google's mea culpa followed a March 6, 2025 subpoena issued by Jordan.
The House Judiciary Committee summarized the admission, underscoring five key points from Google:
Biden officials pressured the company to censor Americans and take down lawful content.Google considers that pressure "unacceptable and wrong."
Public debate should not hinge on deferring to "authorities."
The company will not empower third-party fact-checkers to label or remove content.
European speech rules, including the Digital Services Act, risk forcing removal of lawful American speech.
In unusually plain language for outside counsel, Alphabet told Congress that during COVID-19, "White House officials" sought removal of non-violative videos and that the broader political atmosphere -- "including President Biden" -- sought to influence platform decisions. Alphabet says it "consistently fought against those efforts on First Amendment grounds."
Google excused its behavior, arguing that the "COVID-19 pandemic was an unprecedented time in which online platforms had to reach decisions about how best to balance freedom of expression with responsibility, including responsibility with respect to the moderation of user-generated content that could result in real-world harm." But this reads as a convenient, too-little, too-late defense. Google knew what it was doing and chose policies that harmed lawful speech anyway. Even Alphabet's lawyers now concede that "it is unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden Administration, attempts to dictate how the company moderates content" -- a striking admission, given that the COVID- and election-related speech at issue was plainly protected by the First Amendment.
To illustrate just how materially damaging the removals were, Richard Baris speaks not only to his own experience, but also many others' all too common experiences with Google. Baris (People's Pundit) is a well respected data analyst and commentator whose polling outfit, Big Data Poll, has accurately predicted several presidential elections, including 2024.
During his appearance on the Sep. 24, 2025 QuiteFrankly podcast, Baris describes the excruciating consequences of being suppressed and then banned by Google's YouTube. Like so many others, he was repeatedly struck, demonetized, and throttled by Google, actions that translated to significant lost income, lost audience, and throttled fact-based reporting.
Baris said the strikes and demonetization were ironically triggered by concrete pieces of journalism and data analysis. In one instance, he said he aired and analyzed remarks from the U.K. health minister -- summarizing that masking children "didn't prevent" transmission and could harm cognitive and social development. He said the video was struck for "medical misinformation." YouTube, he said, repeatedly threatened channel closure when he and his team presented longitudinal findings and compared them with published studies. Baris believes that much of it was political, and he is not wrong.