Meta agrees to pay 24 million euros to settle lawsuit with Donald Trump!
Tech giant Meta has agreed to pay $25 million (nearly 24 million euros) to settle a legal dispute with US President Donald Trump after he sued the company for suspending his accounts following the January 6th riots at the Capitol, according to three people familiar with the matter. It is the latest case of a major corporation settling a lawsuit with the new president, who has threatened retaliation against his critics and rivals.
It also comes as Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, have joined other big tech companies in trying to court the new Trump administration. People familiar with the matter spoke on condition of anonymity Wednesday to discuss the deal.
Two of the people said the terms of the agreement include $22 million (21 million euros) going to the nonprofit that will become Trump's future presidential library. The balance will go toward legal fees and other litigation costs, they said. The Wall Street Journal was first to report the settlement.
Zuckerberg visited Trump in November at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida to try to mend fences with the incoming president, something other tech, business and government officials have also done. At the dinner, Trump raised the legal case and suggested they try to settle it, kicking off two months of negotiations between the parties, the people said.
Meta also made a $1 million (959,000 euros) donation to Trump's inaugural committee, and Zuckerberg was among several billionaires given a keynote seat at Trump's inauguration last week in the Capitol Rotunda, along with Google's Sundar Pichai, Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, who now owns Platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
Before Trump's inauguration, Meta announced that he would remove fact-checking from his platform, a long-standing priority of Trump and his allies. Trump filed the lawsuit months after the end of his first term, calling the social media companies' actions "illegal and shameful censorship of the American people."
Twitter, Facebook and Google are all private companies, and users must agree to their own terms of service to use their products. Under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, social media platforms are allowed to moderate their services by removing posts that, for example, are obscene or violate the services' own standards, as long as they act in "good faith."
The law also generally exempts internet companies from liability for material users post. But Trump and some other politicians have long argued that X, Facebook and other social media platforms have abused that protection and should lose their immunity — or at least limit it.
The Meta deal comes after ABC News agreed last month to pay $15 million (14.3 million euros) to Trump's presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos's inaccurate on-air claim that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for rape, according to writer E. Jean Carroll.
The network also agreed to pay $1 million (€959,000) in legal fees to Trump's law firm, Alejandro Brito. The settlement agreement describes the ABC presidential library payment as a "charitable contribution," with the money going to a nonprofit organization being created in connection with the yet-to-be-built library.
The president has been contentious, arguing that he has been the target of unfair coverage by legacy media companies. Trump has filed a lawsuit against CBS News over allegations that the network aired a fraudulent interview with his 2024 opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, on the program '60 Minutes' that constituted "partisan and illegal acts of election and voter interference" intended to "mislead the public and attempt to tip the balance." The program denied the allegations.
And he has a lawsuit against The Des Moines Register, the news outlet's parent company, Gannett, and the paper's Iowa pollster, Ann Selzer, alleging they violated the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act by publishing a poll days before the November election that significantly underestimated his support in the state. The paper and Selzer have denied wrongdoing.
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