Meta has agreed to pay President Trump $25 million to settle a 2021 federal lawsuit alleging First Amendment violations and other claims after he was suspended from Facebook and Instagram in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The payout resolves the suit Trump filed against Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg for allegedly engaging in “impermissible censorship” by removing the president from the social media platforms.
A Meta spokesman confirmed the settlement sum, saying that about $22 million of the settlement will be directed to Trump’s presidential library.
The payment represents a significant victory for Trump, and another step in Zuckerberg’s efforts to court him.
Zuckerberg was among a number of Silicon Valley executives and companies who contributed $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. Earlier this month, he ended Meta’s fact-checking program, which had long been criticized by Trump supporters.
And Zuckerberg promoted Joel Kaplan, a Republican lobbyist, to head the company’s global affairs. In addition, Meta tapped Trump ally Dana White for the company’s board of directors.
In a book Trump published before he was elected, he lamented the more than $400 million Zuckerberg donated in 2020 to support local election offices during the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump then wrote he is watching Zuckerberg closely, threatening to throw the tech billionaire in prison for “the rest of his life.”
Until recently, lawyers for Meta had been fighting the suit, which they said in court papers was baseless, since “Meta and its CEOs are private parties” and the First Amendment applies only to the government’s censorship of speech.
Trump’s suit claimed Meta only suspended Trump’s accounts after being pressured to do so by elected officials, arguing that Meta was then acting at the behest of the government.
In response, Meta’s legal team said Trump was suspended for violating policies against inciting violence, not because of any statement made by a member of Congress.
Meta’s attorneys wrote in a legal submission that it made “little sense to attribute a private party’s action to the government based on a handful of statements from individual members of Congress.”
