Trump account suspended, YouTube will pay $24m to settle lawsuit
Google declined to comment on the reasons for the agreement. Trump's YouTube account was restored in 2023. The deal will not significantly affect Alphabet, which has a market value of nearly $3 trillion
YouTube, owned by Google, has agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump over the 2021 suspension of his account on the social platform following the attack on Capitol Hill on 6 January that year. According to documents filed in federal court in California, $22 million of the settlement will be paid to the Trust for the National Mall and the remaining $2.5 million will be paid to the other parties involved in the lawsuit, including writer Naomi Wolf and the American Conservative Union. The settlement does not constitute an admission of liability, the document says. Google confirmed the settlement, but declined to comment.
Flood lawsuits against media and technology companies
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is the third major technology company to settle a series of lawsuits filed by Trump over what he called an unfair gag order after the end of his first presidential term in January 2021. Trump filed similar lawsuits against Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, and Twitter before the latter was bought by billionaire Elon Musk in 2022 and renamed X.
Meta agreed to pay $25 million to settle the lawsuit filed by Trump for his suspension from Facebook in 2021, while X agreed to settle the lawsuit filed by Trump against Twitter for $10 million. When the lawsuits were filed against Meta, Twitter and YouTube, legal experts predicted that Trump had little chance of prevailing.
ABC News, meanwhile, agreed to pay $15 million in December to Trump's presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit related to the inaccurate statement made on air by host George Stephanopoulos that the president-elect had been held civilly liable for the rape of writer E. Jean Carroll. And in July, Paramount agreed to pay Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit related to the editing of the popular CBS news programme '60 Minutes'.
No official comment from Google
.Google declined to comment on the reasons for the deal, but Trump's YouTube account has been reinstated as of 2023. The deal will not significantly affect Alphabet, which has a market value of nearly $3 trillion, an increase of about $600 billion, or 25%, since Trump's return to the White House. The disclosure of the settlement came a week before a hearing scheduled for 6 October to discuss the case with US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers in Oakland, California.
