YouTube to Pay Trump $24.5 Million to Settle Account Ban Lawsuit

TradingKey - According to court documents, Google-owned video platform YouTube has agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit filed by U.S. President Donald Trump. Trump alleged that YouTube's suspension of his channel following the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot constituted illegal censorship and violated his constitutionally protected freedom of speech.

According to the court documents, the settlement agreement for this case, which has lasted more than four years, will allocate $22 million for Trump's donation to the National Mall Trust Fund and for the construction of the White House State Dining Room. The remaining $250,000 will be paid to other related parties in the case, including author Naomi Wolf and the American Conservative Union.

Notably, the document states: "This Notice of Settlement and Stipulation of Dismissal shall not constitute an admission of liability or fault on the part of the Defendants or their agents, servants, or employees, and is entered into by all Parties for the sole purpose of compromising disputed claims and avoiding the expenses and risks of further litigation."

Looking back at the incident, YouTube suspended Trump's account on January 12, 2021, citing videos uploaded by Trump that allegedly incited violence and violated platform policies. This suspension lasted nearly two years until March 17, 2023, months after Trump had launched his 2024 presidential campaign, when YouTube restored his channel citing "voters' right to hear equally from major national candidates before an election."

As early as mid-2021, Trump filed a joint lawsuit against YouTube, Facebook (now Meta), and Twitter (now X platform) over the suspension of his accounts by these social media platforms. The core argument of these lawsuits was that the platforms' indefinite suspension of his accounts hindered his "exercise of constitutionally protected freedom of speech."

Tech Giants' "Settlement Wave" Raises Questions

Since Trump won his second term in November 2024 and returned to the White House in January 2025, these tech companies have been settling disputes with the president. In January, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced it would pay $25 million to settle its lawsuit with Trump. The following month, Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter) agreed to settle its case related to Trump for approximately $10 million.

However, free speech experts have stated that Trump's three lawsuits against tech giants lacked credible legal basis from the outset. The reason is that the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution typically applies to censorship actions by government officials, not private companies. Private companies exercising content moderation and establishing and enforcing usage rules on their platforms is an exercise of their business autonomy.

Paying tens of millions of dollars to settle Trump's lawsuits alleging censorship represents a stunning reversal for Silicon Valley, which has long defended its right to regulate its own social media platforms.

"This is straight influence-peddling," said Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University and an expert on online speech. "This YouTube settlement is not a sign of any legal merit."

He further analyzed that if these tech companies weren't "an attempt to curry favor with the president," there is "absolutely no reason to believe Trump would have gotten anywhere with these suits."

John P. Coale, Trump’s lead attorney, emphasized the role of Trump’s return to the White House in accelerating the settlements. "If he had not been re-elected, we would have been in court for 1,000 years," Coale said, per The Wall Street Journal.

In August, several Democratic senators, including Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, jointly wrote a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai and YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, expressing their deep concerns about tech companies potentially reaching settlements with the president.

The senators explicitly stated in the letter that they were concerned this might become part of "a quid pro quo arrangement," where tech companies pay settlement fees to secure "favorable treatment" from the Trump administration in other areas, such as antitrust investigations, consumer protection law, or labor law enforcement, to avoid bearing full responsibility for potential violations.