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After Jan. 6, Facebook Banned Trump. Now It's Giving Him $25 Million while ABC agreed to give $25 Million Check
In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg said it was too risky to let Trump on his platform. But he's now cutting a check to stay in Trump's good graces and settle a lawsuit over his ban, the WSJ reports.Meta will pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump over his account suspension in 2021, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Around $22 million of the settlement will go toward Trump’s presidential library, and the rest will be distributed among the plaintiffs of the case, a Meta spokesperson confirmed to the Journal.
Following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, Facebook imposed a 24-hour ban on Trump's account for "two policy violations" on posts in which Trump sympathized with those who were, at the time, terrorizing the Capitol. One post included a video that concluded with Trump telling them, "We love you, you’re very special." A day later, Trump was banned from Facebook and Instagram "indefinitely."
"We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the time.
Twitter (now X) and YouTube imposed similar bans. Elon Musk reinstated Trump's Twitter account in November 2022; YouTube did the same a few months later.
In summer 2021, Trump filed a class-action suit against Facebook, Google, Twitter and their respective CEOs for banning him.
The First Amendment protects people from government censorship, but private companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter are largely free to police their own platforms and ban those who violate their terms of service. Trump, however, argued that protection awarded under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—which holds that internet companies are not liable for the content their users post provided they make a good faith effort to remove it should it violate copyrights or other terms—means they are not private companies, which is not true.
The lawsuit had seen little activity since the fall of 2023, but serious talks began after Zuckerberg visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in November last year, sources tell the Journal. Trump told Zuckerberg that he had to settle the lawsuit if Zuckerberg wanted a place in his “tent.”
Come January, Zuckerberg got a sweet spot at Trump’s inauguration ceremony alongside fellow tech billionaires Musk, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, and Sundar Pichai. Meta also donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund and announced sweeping changes to its content-moderation policies, ditching fact-checkers for Community Notes and lifting restrictions on numerous topics.
On a Wednesday earnings call, Zuckerberg said 2025 will be "a big year for redefining our relationship with governments. We now have a US administration that is proud of our leading companies, prioritizes American technology winning, and that will defend our values and interests abroad. And I'm optimistic about the progress and innovation this is can unlock."
Trump recently signed an executive order intended to stop the government from reaching out to tech companies about harmful content on their platforms. Another EO pardoned and freed everyone who was involved in the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol.
A $25 million check isn't a huge lift for Meta, but will it have a chilling effect on companies or media outlets who don't have the resources to fight back against the US president?
ABC recently agreed to give $15 million to Trump's library after host George Stephanopoulos said Trump had been “found liable for rape” and “defaming the victim of that rape" during a live interview. Trump was instead found liable of sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll; he sued and ABC opted not to fight the case in court. All eyes are on CBS, which is also facing a Trump lawsuit over edits to a 60 Minutes interview with former VP Kamala Harris.
Source: https://www.pcmag.com/news/after-jan-6-facebook-banned-trump-now-its-giving-him-25-million
