YouTube has agreed to pay $24 million to settle a lawsuit from President Donald Trump.
Trump sued the Google-owned tech giant over the suspension of his account following the January 6th, 2021, protests at the U.S. Capitol.
The settlement marks a dramatic reversal of political fortunes, with Trump back at the center of power and his MAGA movement operating in a much friendlier tech landscape than the one that existed during the president’s first term.
Most of the $24 million from YouTube will go towards the construction of Trump’s White House ballroom.
The remainder will go to conservative plaintiffs who accused YouTube of censoring them.
The immediate aftermath of the Capitol chaos marked the low point of Trump’s political career, as Big Tech companies moved swiftly to blacklist him while he was yet a sitting president.
As he campaigned for the White House in 2024, Trump gradually regained access to social media.
He was reinstated by X after Elon Musk bought the platform with a pledge to restore freedom of speech.
Facebook and Google eventually followed suit months later, bringing Trump back to their platforms.
Trump was barred from YouTube for a little over two years before he was brought back in March 2023.
As Breitbart notes, YouTube suspended Trump “in light of concerns about the ongoing potential for violence” following the Capitol protest.
“After review, and in light of concerns about the ongoing potential for violence, we removed new content uploaded to Donald J. Trump’s channel for violating our policies,” the company said at the time.
The political landscape could not look more different now than it did in 2021, with Trump back in the White House and extracting massive sums from his former adversaries in tech and the legacy media.
In addition to YouTube, Trump has pressured Meta/Facebook and X to pay up for suspending his accounts, settling for $25 million and $10 million, respectively.
Meanwhile, major tech companies have changed their policies and apologized for Biden-era censorship.
Just last week, YouTube agreed to reinstate conservatives who had been suspended for disfavored political speech on contentious topics like COVID-19 and elections.
Google, which owns YouTube, conceded that the Biden-era censorship was “unacceptable and wrong.”
At the center of this revolution in the political climate is Trump, whose historic comeback in 2024 changed the course of history.
“[Trump’s] election had a lot to do with it,” John Coale, Trump’s personal attorney, told the New York Post of Trump’s tech settlements.
Our comment section is restricted to members of the Slay News community only.
To join, create a free account HERE.
If you are already a member, log in HERE.