YouTube Agrees to Pay Trump $24.5M Settlement for Kicking Him Off Platform: Report
AP Photo/Evan Vucci
YouTube has agreed to pay Donald Trump $24.5 million for preventing him from posting new videos to his channel after the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riots, according to an exclusive report by The Wall Street Journal.
YouTube fully restored Trump’s account in 2023.
Trump brought the lawsuit against the company and its chief executive in 2021. The Journal reported:
Trump’s share of the settlement—$22 million—will go to the nonprofit Trust for the National Mall, earmarked for the construction of a Mar-a-Lago-style ballroom Trump is building at the White House, according to the court documents. The White House has said the ballroom, expected to cost $200 million, would be funded by donations from Trump and “other patriot donors.”
A further $2.5 million will go to the other plaintiffs on the case, a group that includes the American Conservative Union and writer Naomi Wolf. The settlement doesn’t mention attorney fees.
YouTube is owned by Alphabet’s Google, and is “the final Big Tech company to settle a trio of lawsuits Trump brought against social-media platforms in the months after he left the White House,” the report said. The platform reinstated Trump’s account in 2023.
Meta agreed to pay $25 million, much of which will go to build Trump’s presidential library, while Elon Musk’s X agreed to a $10 million settlement that will go directly to Trump.
The Journal quotes Trump lawyer John P. Coale, who brought the suits with lead litigation attorney John Q. Kelly.
“If he had not been re-elected, we would have been in court for 1,000 years,” Coale said, suggesting that Trump’s return to power motivated the social media companies to settle. “It was his re-election that made the difference.”
The report said the settlement comes as Google is “under pressure from the Justice Department to break up its ad businesses after a federal judge ruled this spring that the company had created a monopoly in advertising.”
Read The Wall Street Journal story here.
CORRECTION: This article has been corrected to reflect that YouTube did not remove Trump from the platform. Rather, it prevented him from posting new videos to his channel.
