YouTube to Pay $24.5M to Settle Trump Lawsuit

YouTube has agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit filed by US President Donald Trump. The case was filed after the platform suspended Trump's account in response to the January 6, 2021 riots at the US Capitol.

According to court documents filed on September 29, under the agreement, YouTube, which is owned by Google's parent company Alphabet, will transfer $22 million on Trump's behalf to the "National Mall Trust Fund." This non-profit organization is currently overseeing a $200 million project to build a ballroom at the White House.

The remaining $2.5 million will be provided to the other plaintiffs in the case, including the "American Conservative Union" and American writer Naomi Wolf.

It is important to note that the agreement does not contain any admission of wrongdoing by YouTube. As stated in the document, it was reached "to compromise on disputed claims and to avoid the costs and risks of further litigation." This amount is relatively small for YouTube, whose advertising revenues for the second quarter of 2025 alone amounted to about $9.8 billion.

This settlement comes after Meta Platforms (Facebook) and X (formerly Twitter) also agreed to multi-million dollar payments earlier this year to resolve Trump's claims that he was unfairly censored after the January 6 events.

Trump's ally and lawyer, John P. Coale, who handled these three cases, expressed his satisfaction with the outcome.

"We think we've changed their behavior," he said, adding that a total of $60 million was received in the three cases.

Although the big tech companies had removed Trump from their platforms out of fear that his false claims about the 2020 election were inciting violence, after his return to the White House, they have begun trying to find favor with his administration. Earlier this month, tech company executives, including Google's Sundar Pichai, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, and Apple's Tim Cook, praised Trump and expressed support for his administration's initiatives in the field of artificial intelligence during a dinner at the White House.

Timothy Koskie, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sydney, noted that this move by YouTube is a blow to the hopes of a consistent approach to content moderation by social media platforms. "Unfortunately, in the context of the erosion of the rules-based order, we simply cannot expect consistent treatment from anyone who seeks to benefit from this administration," he said, adding that this does not eliminate censorship, but "on the contrary, it strongly encourages censorship in a highly selective manner."