Alphabet Inc.’s Google agreed to pay $24.5 million to resolve Donald Trump’s claims that being blocked from posting on his YouTube channel after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol was illegal censorship, according to a court filing.
The settlement disclosed Monday ends Trump’s long-running legal challenge to the suspension. The filing says $22 million will go toward construction of a new ballroom in the White House, a project near and dear to Trump. The remainder will go to a handful of other plaintiffs who joined Trump in the legal action.
Trump has managed since winning back the presidency in November to secure favorable settlements with other tech and media giants that he accused of mistreating him — in spite of courts having regularly ruled that social media companies have a First Amendment right to moderate content as they please.
“I’m happy, the president is happy to get this resolved,” John Coale, a lawyer who has represented Trump in his cases over the social media suspensions, said in a text. Google declined to comment.
The settlement comes as Google has been embroiled in antitrust battles with the Justice Department and faces the possibility that a judge could force the company to divest a key piece of its business — an advertising exchange. The Alphabet unit scored a major win earlier this month when a Washington federal judge rejected the US government’s request to force the sale of the Chrome web browser after finding Google illegally monopolized online search.
Walt Disney Co.’s ABC News agreed in December to pay $15 million toward a future Trump presidential foundation or museum to end a suit claiming anchor George Stephanopoulos defamed him in a statement about a court case against Trump.
In January, Meta Platforms Inc. agreed to pay a total of $25 million — including $22 million for a Trump library — to resolve Trump’s suit over his suspension from Facebook after the attack on the Capitol by a mob of his supporters following his 2020 election defeat.
Trump ended his legal fight with Twitter over its Jan. 6 ban in February. Court filings didn’t reveal details on a settlement. The Wall Street Journal later reported, citing unidentified people, that X — the name that Elon Musk gave the platform after he bought it in 2022 — agreed to pay about $10 million to resolve the president’s claims.
In July, Paramount Global announced a $16 million settlement with Trump over his suit accusing CBS Broadcasting Inc. of deceptively editing its October 60 Minutes interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris during the presidential campaign.
The network, which had previously denied wrongdoing, released an unedited version and has agreed to release transcripts of presidential candidate interviews in the future. Although officially unrelated, the settlement was widely viewed as critical for Paramount to gain approval from federal regulators for its merger with Skydance Media.
When Trump separately sued Google, Facebook and Twitter over his deplatforming, he sought monetary damages to punish the companies and ensure other users can’t be banned or flagged by the tech giants. All three companies eventually dropped the suspensions, but by then Trump had largely shifted his social media commentary to his own network, Truth Social.
He went on to lose his case against Twitter in a trial court, with a San Francisco federal judge ruling in 2021 that the company didn’t trample constitutional free-speech rights when it suspended his account and those of other users for violations of its terms of service. Trump’s appeal was still pending when a settlement was reached.
The Google settlement was reported earlier by the Wall Street Journal.
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