YouTube is the latest major tech platform to settle its legal strife with President Donald Trump.
On Monday, the video platform owned by Alphabet’s Google agreed to a $22 million payment to Trump over censoring his content in 2021. YouTube and other tech giants like X and Meta faced lawsuits after suspending Trump over his content regarding the Jan. 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol.
At the time, X, previously Twitter, said Trump’s posts were causing a “risk of further incitement of violence,” according to Axios. Trump then accused the platforms of acting unconstitutionally.
According to the settlement that was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Trump’s reward will go to the Trust for the National Mall, a nonprofit “dedicated to restoring, preserving, and elevating the National Mall, to support the construction of the White House State Ballroom.”
An additional $2.5 million will be allocated to other plaintiffs, including the American Conservative Union and American writer Naomi Wolf.
Trump posted on Truth Social following the news of the settlement, “This MASSIVE victory proves Big Tech censorship has consequences. Every shadowbanned patriot deserves justice.”
However, the settlement emphasized that it does “not constitute an admission of liability or fault” by the defendants.
Since Trump entered his second term, Big Tech has seemed to change its relationship status with the president, after four years of cases and censorship against him.
In the last year, Meta, X and now YouTube have settled multimillion-dollar agreements with the president. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and X’s Elon Musk were all present at the presidential inauguration last January, and multiple other tech giants attended a White House dinner on artificial intelligence earlier this month.
“If he hadn’t been reelected, we’d be in court forever,” John Coale, a lawyer for Trump, told CNN. “Then the president gets reelected and things look a lot better.”