YouTube reportedly agreed to a $24.5 million settlement over a lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump over the suspension of his account in 2021.
The vast majority of YouTube’s settlement will be directed toward funding construction of a new White House ballroom that Trump is building. Court documents say that $22 million will be given to the Trust for the National Mall, which is “dedicated to restoring, preserving, and elevating the National Mall, to support the construction of the White House State Ballroom,” according to CNN.
The remaining settlement money, $2.5 million, will go toward other plaintiffs on the case, such as the American Conservative Union, according to The Wall Street Journal.
YouTube, owned by Alphabet’s Google, suspended the president’s account after the events of January 6, 2021, claiming that Trump, then in the final days of his first term, had violated the platform’s rules regarding incitement to violence. YouTube reinstated Trump’s account two years later and is the final big tech company to settle a lawsuit from the president over a slate of social media bans.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, settled a lawsuit with Trump for $25 million in January. Most of Meta’s settlement funds were directed toward Trump’s presidential library to be built in Miami, Florida. X, formerly Twitter before Trump ally Elon Musk took over the platform in 2022, settled a lawsuit with the president in February for $10 million.
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X reinstated Trump’s account in 2022 soon after Musk took over the social media platform. Meta waited longer, reinstating the president’s accounts in February 2023.
All three cases against the big tech platforms were pursued by Trump attorney John Coale. Coale attributed the settlement victories to Trump’s election to the White House for a second term.
“If he had not been re-elected, we would have been in court for 1,000 years,” Coale said, according to WSJ. “It was his re-election that made the difference.”
Trump has forged ties with Silicon Valley executives over the course of his third run for president and his second term in the White House. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai joined Musk in choice seats to witness Trump’s second inauguration.