Trump
SAN FRANCISCO - Google will pay $24.5 million to settle a potential class action lawsuit led by President Donald Trump over accusations that Google subsidiary YouTube yielded to pressure from the Biden administration and other Democrats and left-wing activists to censor Trump and his supporters beginning in 2021.
On Sept. 29, attorneys for Trump, personally, and his co-plaintiffs filed a motion jointly with attorneys for YouTube LLC, announcing the settlement.
Trump will not receive any of the money under the deal, personally.
Rather, the parent company of YouTube will contribute $22 million to the Trust for the National Mall, a nonprofit group which describes its mission as securing funds and leading the effort to preserve, enrich and improve the monuments and public common spaces at the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
The group particularly highlights its work to prepare the Mall for the U.S.'s 250th Semiquincentennial celebration in 2026.
In addition to those funds, Google and YouTube will also pay $2.5 million to the American Conservative Union and a group of individual conservatives and Trump supporters who were identified as Trump's co-plaintiffs in the action.
Trump and his co-plaintiffs lodged the action first in South Florida federal court in 2021.
The lawsuit was initially filed against a group of defendants, including the social media company then known as Twitter; Facebook and Instagram parent, Meta; and Google, via its subsidiary, YouTube.
In the complaint, the president and his co-plaintiffs blasted YouTube and the other social media platform operators for buckling to demands by Biden's administration and other Democrats to take down or block access to videos and other content Trump and many of his supporters sought to post amid the turmoil surrounding the 2020 presidential election.
On Sept. 23, Google publicly admitted in a letter to lawmakers that it, indeed, censored Trump and other conservative voices at the request of the Biden administration and even President Joe Biden, himself. The company further committed to restoring the accounts of every conservative content creator it deplatformed or censored after 2021.
At the time, Biden and Democrats sought to downplay the nascent censorship claims by asserting the platforms had chosen of their own will to remove and block content it believed to be dangerous or incendiary "misinformation" concerning both the outcome of the 2020 elections and concerning the origins of the virus that caused the Covid pandemic and critical of the government response to the pandemic.
The platforms based their justification for the censorship on claims that allowing Trump and his supporters to continue posting their content had already been proven dangerous by the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Hill riot, or so-called "insurrection."
In the complaint, Trump and his co-plaintiffs noted Democratic lawmakers and other prominent left-wing political figures mounted a massive pressure campaign against the social media companies, threatening them with regulatory actions and potential new laws hampering their business model and technology if they did not acquiesce to the Democratic censorship demands.
"Democrat legislators intended to make it considerably more difficult for the Plaintiff (Trump) to communicate directly with the American public by having him banned from YouTube, while congressional Democrats, candidates, and supporters would have unlimited access to YouTube and other social media platforms," Trump's lawyers wrote in the complaint.
"As a result of Defendants' censorship, our national discourse is becoming immeasurably imbalanced and one-sided on race, medicine, the election process, the economy, immigration, etc.," the complaint said at the time it was filed in 2021.
The case was ultimately broken up into three separate proceedings and all were transferred to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
Twitter, which has since been purchased by billionaire Elon Musk and rebranded as X Corp., paid $10 million to settle the claims against it.
Meta paid $25 million to settle the lawsuit.
According to the new settlement with YouTube, the $22 million payment to the Trust for the National Mall will be used to "support the construction of the White House State Ballroom," a project being carried out as part of Trump's extensive renovation of the White House and its grounds.
Trump is represented in the action by attorneys John O. Kelly, of the firm of Ferguson Cohen LLP, of Greenwich, Connecticut; and John P. Coale, of Washington, D.C.
According to the settlement notice, Coale will oversee the distribution of the funds.
YouTube LLC is represented by attorney Brian M. Willen and others, of the firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, of San Franciso and New York.
