YouTube agreed Monday to pay $24.5 million to settle President Donald Trump’s lawsuit over the platform’s decision to suspend his account in 2021 following the January 6 riot.
YouTube agreed to pay $22 million to Trump and $2.5 million to other conservative plaintiffs including the American Conservative Union, court papers show. Trump originally sued YouTube in 2021 for removing his account after the January 6 riot. Trump was allowed back on the platform in 2023 in the early stages of his presidential campaign.
YouTube’s payment to Trump will go toward preserving the National Mall in downtown Washington, D.C., and the construction of a new White House ballroom, according to the settlement agreement. The settlement is not an admission of guilt from YouTube.
The agreement between Trump and YouTube comes after YouTube overhauled its approach to content moderation to promote free speech following years of pressure from House Republicans. YouTube’s changes include the restoration of banned creators and the creation of a “community notes” fact-checking system similar to the one pioneered by Elon Musk at Twitter, now known as X.
In addition, YouTube lambasted the Biden administration’s incessant pressure on the platform to censor speech related to the Covid-19 pandemic, even when the speech did not violate YouTube’s policies. House Republicans led by Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) spent years investigating YouTube’s suppression, at the behest of the Biden administration, of certain Covid-19 viewpoints.
Last week, YouTube admitted it had relied too heavily on public health authorities during the Covid-19 pandemic at the expense of healthy public debate about pandemic-era issues that were not settled.
Trump’s agreement with YouTube also marks the latest settlement between the president and large media and tech companies. Meta paid Trump $25 million in January to settle a lawsuit against the tech company for shutting down his Facebook and Instagram accounts for two years after January 6. Like YouTube, Meta made sweeping changes to its free speech policies after pressure from Republican lawmakers and Trump’s 2024 election victory. Meta did so after CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook was wrong when it censored the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 and when it complied with the Biden administration’s request that it censor certain viewpoints about Covid-19.
In December, ABC News and Trump settled for $15 million to resolve Trump’s defamation suit against the network after host George Papadopoulos falsely accused him of being a convicted rapist. He agreed to a similar $16 million settlement with Paramount in July after Trump sued CBS for deceptively editing a 60 Minutes interview with 2024 rival Kamala Harris. Paramount had a pending merger with Skydance at the time of the settlement, which the Trump administration later approved.
Trump’s recently sued the Wall Street Journal for its reporting on his friendship with deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Earlier this month, Trump had a separate defamation lawsuit against the New York Times dismissed in Florida, although he has several weeks to try again with an amended complaint.