WASHINGTON – According to three people familiar with the matter, Meta has agreed to pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump against the company after it suspended his accounts following the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
It is the latest instance of a large corporation settling litigation with the president, who has threatened retaliation against his critics and rivals, and it comes as Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, have joined other large technology companies in attempting to curry favor with the new Trump administration.
People familiar with the situation spoke on condition of anonymity Wednesday to discuss the agreement. According to two sources, the agreement includes $22 million for the nonprofit that will become Trump’s future presidential library, with the remaining funds going to legal fees and other litigants.
In November, Zuckerberg paid a visit to Trump’s private Florida club as part of a group of technology, business, and government officials who traveled to Palm Beach to try to mend fences with the incoming president.
At the dinner, Trump mentioned the litigation and suggested they try to resolve it, which sparked two months of negotiations between the parties, according to the sources.
Meta also donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, and Zuckerberg, along with Google’s Sundar Pichai, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk, who now owns the platform X, formerly known as Twitter, were among several billionaires given prime seating at Trump’s swearing-in last week in the Capitol Rotunda.
Ahead of Trump’s inauguration, Meta also announced that it would discontinue fact-checking on its platform, a long-standing priority of Trump and his allies.
Trump filed the lawsuit months after leaving office, calling the actions of the social media companies “illegal, shameful censorship of the American people.”
Twitter, Facebook, and Google are all private companies, and users must agree to their terms of service before using their products.
Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act allows social media platforms to moderate their services by removing posts that are obscene or violate the service’s own standards, as long as they act in “good faith.” The law also generally exempts internet service providers from liability for the content that users post.
However, Trump and some other politicians have long argued that X, formerly known as Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms, has abused that immunity and should lose it — or at least have it reduced.
The Meta settlement comes after ABC News agreed last month to pay $15 million to Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air statement that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll.
The network also agreed to pay $1 million in legal fees to Trump’s attorney, Alejandro Brito, and his law firm.
The settlement agreement refers to ABC’s presidential library payment as a “charitable contribution,” with the funds designated for a non-profit organization to be established in conjunction with the yet-to-be-built library.
The Wall Street Journal was the first to report on the settlement.
In October 2021, approximately nine months after being expelled from the major social media platforms, Trump announced the launch of his own new media company, complete with its own social media platform.
Trump claims that his motivation for launching the Trump Media & Technology Group and its “Truth Social” app was to create a competitor to the Big Tech companies that have shut him out and denied him the megaphone that was critical to his national rise.
While he frequently posts policy announcements, memes, and other insights on Truth Social, he has relied on his return to X and Facebook to spread those messages to the platform’s vast audiences.
