A lawsuit brought by Donald Trump to the tune of $25 million has been settled by Facebook-owner Meta.
The 47th president of the United States filed the suit in 2021 after Trump was banned from Facebook – a decision taken by the company in the aftermath of the Capitol riots on January 6th of that year.
The lion’s share of the settlement sum will reportedly be spent on Trump’s planned Presidential Library.
$25 Million Zucker Punch
The settlement – which was initially reported by the Wall Street Journal (paywalled) – has been signed by president Trump and will require Meta to pay him around $25 million. Meta has since confirmed the settlement.
The report suggests that $22 million will be used to pay for a Presidential library that Trump originally established as he left office the first time and has hitherto existed only as an online resource managed by the National Archives and Records Administration. The rest of the money will go towards legal fees and to fellow plaintiffs.
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The news comes amidst a thawing of relations between Trump and Mark Zuckerberg, culminating in the Meta CEO’s invite to the returning president’s inauguration in Washington – he was among a throng of big tech CEOs in attendance that also included Elon Musk (X, SpaceX, Tesla), Jeff Bezos (formerly Amazon), Tim Cook (Apple) and Sam Altman (OpenAI).
It was also widely reported that Meta contributed $1 million to Trump’s reelection campaign and that Zuckerberg had visited the president at his Mar-a-Lago home shortly after election day.
“Ongoing Risk of Violence”
Much like other platforms including Snapchat, YouTube and a ‘permanent’ ban from Twitter (which was eventually reversed by Musk), Meta took the decision to suspend Trump’s Facebook and Instagram handles following the January 6th Capitol riots.
The suspension was later upheld by Facebook’s Oversight Board, which said that the actions were justified due to the “the seriousness of the violations and the ongoing risk of violence”.
As well as prompting Trump to launch his own social media platform Truth Social, he also filed class-actions lawsuits against Meta, Twitter and YouTube as the lead plaintiff, claiming that his constitutional right to freedom of speech had been violated.
Meta ended Trump’s Facebook and Instagram suspensions in January 2023, after determining that the risk had “sufficiently receded”.
Meta Mates
Earlier this month, Meta announced that it was scrapping external moderation in a move towards greater freedom of speech on its platforms, instead using a ‘Community Notes’ model similar to that used by X.
This has been seen as another way in which Zuckerberg is seeking to curry favor with Trump, who is a self-described freedom of speech champion. The company has also brought in Joel Kaplan as its new chief global affairs officer – Kaplan is a prominent member of the Republican party and was a White House aide for president George W. Bush.
Meanwhile, both Zuckerberg and Trump are seeking to downsize their respective personnel. The former has warned that Meta layoffs could see 5% of workforce cut, while the president has vowed to save $100 billion of governmental budget by shedding staff. Just this week, Trump made a severance offer to federal employees to buyout their contracts.
