YouTube agrees to pay Trump $24.5M to settle lawsuit over account suspension

YouTube has agreed to pay $24.5m to settle a suit brought by Donald Trump in 2021 that alleged the platform wrongly suspended his channel after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. The Google subsidiary is the latest in a long string of tech companies to make a multimillion-dollar payout to the president over past decisions about his accounts.

Trump had filed the suit against YouTube and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, alleging that the platform had “accumulated an unprecedented concentration of power, market share, and ability to dictate our nation’s public discourse”. YouTube said it suspended Trump’s channel because it had violated the website’s policies against inciting violence. Because of the settlement, the case is now dismissed. Google and the White House did not immediately return a request for comment.

The news comes just a week after YouTube announced that it would allow creators who were once banned for spreading misinformation about Covid-19 and the 2020 US presidential election to be reinstated. In its announcement, YouTube blamed the account suspensions on pressure from Joe Biden and said it celebrated conservative voices on its site.

Facebook-parent company Meta settled a similar lawsuit for $25m in January, and the social media platform X, previously Twitter, settled another for $10m in February. Most of the payout from the Meta suit will go to Trump’s presidential library fund. For the YouTube settlement, Trump has directed $22m of the payment to go to restoring and preserving the National Mall and supporting construction of the White House ballroom, slated to cost about $200m, according to documents filed in the northern district of California.

The three cases were first brought by Trump lawyer and ally, John Coale, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news. Coale told the Journal that Trump’s return to the White House was instrumental in reaching the slew of settlements with tech companies, saying: “If he had not been re-elected, we would have been in court for 1,000 years”. Coale is now Trump’s deputy special envoy to Ukraine and Belarus.

The case against YouTube had been closed in 2023, but Trump’s lawyers filed to reopen the case after he won the presidency in 2024. Before his victory, all three of the lawsuits faced uphill court battles. A federal judge dismissed the case against Twitter in 2022, and the suits against Meta and YouTube were stayed, then the latter was administratively close. Trump’s lawyers, however, revived the cases with appeals to overturn all each ruling.

YouTube first suspended Trump’s channel for seven days on 12 January 2021, after he posted a video where he said the speech he made to his supporters on January 6 before the Capitol riot was “totally appropriate”. YouTube said it suspended the channel over “concerns about the ongoing potential for violence”. The company then extended the ban without an end date.

It wasn’t until March 2023, after Trump announced his bid for his second presidency, that YouTube reinstated Trump’s channel, saying it “carefully evaluated the continued risk of real-world violence, balancing that with the importance of preserving the opportunity for voters to hear equally from major national candidates in the run up to an election”.

Within hours of getting his channel back, Trump posted: “I’M BACK!” accompanied by an 11-second video of him talking at a rally saying: “Sorry to keep you waiting. Complicated business. Complicated.”