YouTube has agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit brought by President Donald Trump over the platform’s suspension of his account following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The federal court for Trump v. YouTube, LLC (N.D. Cal., No. 4:21-cv-08009) says that YouTube will pay $24.5 million to settle a case that President Donald Trump brought when the platform suspended his account after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Before the case management session in Oakland on October 6, the settlement was made public.
As part of the deal, Google, the firm that owns YouTube, did not confess to any wrongdoing. News reports that first talked about the contract said that it doesn’t need YouTube to adjust its policies or offerings.
Trump sued YouTube in 2021, saying that the suspension was illegal censorship. In general, courts have said that private firms are not subject to the First Amendment in the same manner that governments are. Other lawsuits against other platforms had very little chances of success. Because of the deal, the YouTube case concludes without a decision on those issues.
Two days after the Capitol incident, YouTube took down Trump’s channel. It was back up in March 2023. At the time, the firm stated it had thought about the possibility of real-world violence and would keep enforcing its regulations on the channel in the future.
The decision ends one of the many lawsuits Trump brought in 2021 against key platforms over restrictions that were put in place after January 6. Earlier this year, Meta and X both settled cases that were related to each other.
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