YouTube to pay US$24.5 million to settle lawsuit over Trump's account suspension after January 6 attack

Google's YouTube has agreed to pay US$24.5 million to settle a lawsuit President Donald Trump brought after the video site suspended his account following the January 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 US$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 US$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 US$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.

After buying Twitter for US$44.5 billion, Musk later became major contributor to Trump's successful 2024 campaign that resulted in his re-election and then spent several months leading a cost-cutting effort that purged thousands of workers from the federal government payroll before the two had a bitter falling out. Both Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg were among the tech leaders who lined up behind Trump during his second inauguration in January in a show of solidarity that was widely interpreted as a sign of the industry's intention to work more closely with the president than during his first administration.

ABC News, meanwhile, agreed to pay US$15 million in December toward Trump's presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos' inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E Jean Carroll. And in July, Paramount decided to pay Trump US$16 million to settle a lawsuit regarding editing at CBS' storied '60 Minutes' news programme.

The settlement does not constitute an admission of liability, the filing says. Google confirmed the settlement but declined to comment beyond it.

Google declined to comment on the reasons for the settlement., but Trump's YouTube account has been restored since 2023. The settlement is will barely dent Alphabet, which has a market value of nearly US$3 trillion — an increase of about US$600 billion, or 25 per cent, since Trump's return to the White House.

The disclosure of the settlement came a week before a scheduled October 6 court hearing to discuss the case with US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers in Oakland, California.

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