I still remember the two days when it felt like people would actually stand up to Donald Trump when he was at his most violently unhinged state. One day was Election Night in 2020, when the results became increasingly bad for Trump and he started lying and ranting in a live press conference. News outlets actually took him off the air and said openly that he was lying his ass off. Then it happened again on January 6th, 2021, when Trump incited the insurrection. That was the biggest break – all social media companies immediately banned Trump’s accounts, finally showing some corporate responsibility as insurrectionists tried to hunt down members of Congress. Well, after all of that, Trump sued every social media and media company that ever took his dangerous lies off the air or banned him from their platform. Trump sued Meta/Facebook and they settled with Trump in January of this year, giving him $25 million. Elon Musk also settled with Trump when Musk bought Twitter. Well, now YouTube has settled after they suspended Trump’s YT account after J6.

Alphabet, parent company of YouTube, has agreed to pay a total of $24.5 million to settle President Donald Trump’s 2021 lawsuit alleging “censorship” over YouTube’s suspension of his account for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The terms of the settlement were disclosed in a court filing Monday. YouTube, Google and Alphabet did not admit any wrongdoing nor did they agree to make any policy or product changes as part of the settlement.

The settlement by Alphabet over the YouTube suit comes after Meta and X (formerly Twitter) have also paid Trump millions to resolve similar lawsuits. In addition, Paramount Global this summer paid $16 million to Trump to settle his lawsuit over a “60 Minutes” segment (followed by the FCC’s approval of Skydance Media’s acquisition of Paramount less than a month later), and Disney in December 2024 agreed to pay $15 million to Trump’s presidential library (plus $1 million in legal fees) to settle a defamation lawsuit against ABC News and anchor George Stephanopoulos.

Of the $24.5 million total, Alphabet will pay $22 million to “settle and resolve with Plaintiff Donald J. Trump any and all disputes and claims arising out of or relating to the Action, which he has directed to be contributed, on his behalf, to the Trust for the National Mall, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt entity dedicated to restoring, preserving, and elevating the National Mall [and] to support the construction of the White House State Ballroom,” the filing says.

Alphabet also will pay $2.5 million to other plaintiffs in the case — the American Conservative Union, Andrew Baggiani, Austen Fletcher, Maryse Veronica Jean-Louis, Frank Valentine, Kelly Victory and Naomi Wolf — to settle “any and all disputes and claims arising out of or relating to the Action, to be distributed among them in accordance with the terms of the Settlement Agreements executed between Defendants and those Plaintiffs,” per the filing.

[From Variety]

This is so f–king stupid. I wish corporations had a f–king backbone, the social media companies in particular. The whole reason why Trump’s social media accounts were suspended on January 6th was because he was ACTIVELY inciting the insurrection online, on their platforms and he was clearly calling for violence. He was directly threatening members of Congress and his own vice president. The companies had an enormous liability if they continued to platform Trump’s threats and incitement. It’s not “censorship” to suspend a fascist’s account when he’s sowing violence and chaos. I’m so disappointed in YouTube, Meta and all of these companies. Stop capitulating! Fight back!

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.