YouTube has agreed to pay $24.5m to settle a lawsuit brought by United States President Donald Trump after the platform suspended his account in response to the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol.
Under the settlement, YouTube, which is owned by Google parent company Alphabet, will contribute $22m on Trump’s behalf to the Trust for the National Mall, a nonprofit that is overseeing a $200m project to construct a ballroom at the White House, a court filing showed on Monday.
The remaining $2.5m will go to other plaintiffs in the case, including the American Conservative Union and American author Naomi Wolf, according to the filing at the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
The settlement does not include any admission of wrongdoing by YouTube, and was reached for the “sole purpose of compromising disputed claims and avoiding the expenses and risks of further litigation”, according to the filing.
The payout is a relatively small sum for YouTube, whose advertising revenues came to nearly $9.8bn in the second quarter of 2025 alone.
The settlement comes after Meta Platforms and X earlier this year agreed to multimillion-dollar payouts to resolve Trump’s claims that he was unduly censored following the January 6 attack, which was carried out by Trump supporters motivated by his false claim that the 2020 election had been “stolen”.
John P Coale, a Trump ally and lawyer who brought the three cases, said he was pleased with the outcome.
“Very much so,” Coale told Al Jazeera. “As is the president and the other plaintiffs.”
Coale said the three cases had netted $60m in total.
“We believe we changed the behaviour,” he said.
After de-platforming Trump over fears his false claims about the 2020 presidential election were driving violence, Big Tech has moved to curry favour with his administration since his return to the White House.
Earlier this month, tech CEOs, including Google’s Sundar Pichai, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s Tim Cook, lavished praise on Trump at a White House dinner event and expressed support for his administration’s initiatives on artificial intelligence.
Media companies have also paid out large sums to resolve Trump’s legal claims.
Paramount Global said in July that it had agreed to pay $16m to resolve Trump’s claims that CBS News’s 60 Minutes programme had deceptively edited an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.
In December, ABC News agreed to contribute $15m to Trump’s library to settle claims that he had been defamed by its anchor, George Stephanopoulos.
Timothy Koskie, a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney, said that YouTube’s settlement dealt a blow to hopes for a consistent approach to content moderation by social media platforms.
“Unfortunately, with the erosion of a rules-based order, we simply can’t expect to get consistent treatment from anyone who seeks to benefit from this administration,” Koskie told Al Jazeera.
“That is going to include an incredibly large swath of companies that we engage with in our daily lives, particularly, but very much not exclusively, the platforms. Rather than removing censorship, this vigorously empowers it in an especially selective vein.”
“Further, the US historically set precedents for many governments around the world,” he added.
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