YouTube to pay £18m to settle lawsuit over Trump’s account suspension

Google’s YouTube has agreed to pay 24.5 million dollars (£18.1 million) to settle a lawsuit president Donald Trump brought after the video site suspended his account following the January 6 2021 attacks on the US Capitol.

The settlement of the more than four-year-old case earmarks 22 million dollars (£16.3 million) for Mr Trump to contribute to the Trust for the National Mall and the construction of a White House ballroom, according to court documents filed on Monday.

The remaining 2.5 million dollars (£1.8 million) will be paid to other parties involved in the case, including the writer Naomi Wolf and the American Conservative Union.

Alphabet, the parent of Google, is the third major technology company to settle a volley of lawsuits that Mr Trump brought for what he alleged had unfairly muzzled him after his first term as president ended in January 2021.

He filed similar cases against Facebook parent Meta Platforms and Twitter before it was bought by billionaire Elon Musk in 2022 and rebranded as X.

Meta agreed to pay 25 million dollars (£18.6 million) to settle Mr Trump’s lawsuit over his 2021 suspension from Facebook and X agreed to settle the lawsuit that Mr Trump brought against Twitter for 10 million dollars (£7.4 million).

When the lawsuits against Meta. Twitter and YouTube were filed, legal experts predicted Mr Trump had little chance of prevailing.

After buying Twitter for 44.5 billion dollars (£32.7 billion), Mr Musk later became a major contributor to Mr Trump’s successful 2024 campaign that resulted in his re-election and then spent several months leading a cost-cutting effort that purged thousands of workers from the federal government payroll before the two had a bitter falling out.

Both Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai and Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg were among the tech leaders who lined up behind Mr Trump during his second inauguration in January in a show of solidarity that was widely interpreted as a sign of the industry’s intention to work more closely with the president than during his first administration.

The settlement does not constitute an admission of liability, the filing says. Google confirmed the settlement but declined to comment beyond it.

Google declined to comment on the reasons for the settlement, but Mr Trump’s YouTube account has been restored since 2023.

The settlement will barely dent Alphabet, which has a market value of nearly 3 trillion dollars (£2.23 trillion) — an increase of about 600 billion dollars (£446.6 billion), or 25%, since Mr Trump’s return to the White House.

The disclosure of the settlement came a week before a scheduled October 6 court hearing to discuss the case with US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers in Oakland, California.