YouTube to pay $24.5m to settle lawsuit over Trump’s account suspension | Donald Trump

Video platform settles lawsuit filed in response to Trump’s suspension over the January 6, 2021, riot on the US Capitol.

YouTube has agreed to pay $24.5m to settle a lawsuit introduced by United States President Donald Trump after the platform suspended his account in response to the January 6, 2021, riot on the US Capitol.

Below the settlement, YouTube, which is owned by Google guardian firm Alphabet, will contribute $22m on Trump’s behalf to the Belief for the Nationwide Mall, a nonprofit that’s overseeing a $200m venture to assemble a ballroom on the White Home, a court docket submitting confirmed on Monday.

The remaining $2.5m will go to different plaintiffs within the case, together with the American Conservative Union and American writer Naomi Wolf, in keeping with the submitting on the US District Court docket for the Northern District of California.

The settlement doesn’t embrace any admission of wrongdoing by YouTube, and was reached for the “sole objective of compromising disputed claims and avoiding the bills and dangers of additional litigation”, in keeping with the submitting.

The payout is a comparatively small sum for YouTube, whose promoting revenues got here to just about $9.8bn within the second quarter of 2025 alone.

The settlement comes after Meta Platforms and X earlier this yr agreed to multimillion-dollar payouts to resolve Trump’s claims that he was unduly censored following the January 6 assault, which was carried out by Trump supporters motivated by his false declare that the 2020 election had been “stolen”.

John P Coale, a Trump ally and lawyer who introduced the three instances, mentioned he was happy with the result.

“Very a lot so,” Coale instructed Al Jazeera. “As is the president and the opposite plaintiffs.”

Coale mentioned the three instances had netted $60m in complete.

“We consider we modified the behaviour,” he mentioned.

After de-platforming Trump over fears his false claims in regards to the 2020 presidential election have been driving violence, Large Tech has moved to curry favour along with his administration since his return to the White Home.

Earlier this month, tech CEOs, together with Google’s Sundar Pichai, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s Tim Cook dinner, lavished reward on Trump at a White Home dinner occasion and expressed help for his administration’s initiatives on synthetic intelligence.

Media corporations have additionally paid out giant sums to resolve Trump’s authorized claims.

Paramount International mentioned in July that it had agreed to pay $16m to resolve Trump’s claims that CBS Information’s 60 Minutes programme had deceptively edited an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.

In December, ABC Information agreed to contribute $15m to Trump’s library to settle claims that he had been defamed by its anchor, George Stephanopoulos.

Timothy Koskie, a postdoctoral researcher on the College of Media and Communications on the College of Sydney, mentioned that YouTube’s settlement dealt a blow to hopes for a constant strategy to content material moderation by social media platforms.

“Sadly, with the erosion of a rules-based order, we merely can’t anticipate to get constant remedy from anybody who seeks to profit from this administration,” Koskie instructed Al Jazeera.

“That’s going to incorporate an extremely giant swath of corporations that we interact with in our every day lives, significantly, however very a lot not solely, the platforms. Slightly than eradicating censorship, this vigorously empowers it in an particularly selective vein.”

“Additional, the US traditionally set precedents for a lot of governments all over the world,” he added.