Meta agrees to pay £20m to settle lawsuit from Trump after January 6 suspension

Meta has agreed to pay 25 million dollars (£20 million) to settle a lawsuit filed by US President Donald Trump against the company after it suspended his accounts following the January 6 2021 attack on the Capitol, according to three people familiar with the matter.

It is the latest instance of a large corporation settling litigation with the president, who has threatened retribution on his critics and rivals, and comes as Meta and its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg have joined other large technology companies in trying to ingratiate themselves with the new Trump administration.

The people familiar with the matter spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the agreement.

Two people said that terms of the agreement include 22 million dollars (£17.6 million) going to the non-profit that will become Mr Trump’s future presidential library and the balance going to legal fees and other litigants.

Mr Zuckerberg visited Mr Trump in November at his private Florida club as part of a series of technology, business and government officials to make a pilgrimage to Palm Beach to try to mend fences with the incoming president.

At the dinner, Mr Trump brought up the litigation and suggested they try to resolve it, kickstarting two months of negotiations between the parties, the people said.

Meta also made a one million dollar (£803,000) donation to Mr Trump’s inaugural committee and Mr Zuckerberg was among several billionaires granted prime seating during Mr Trump’s swearing-in last week in the Capitol Rotunda, along with Google’s Sundar Pichai, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, who now owns the platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

Ahead of Mr Trump’s inauguration, Meta also announced that it was dropping fact-checking on its platform – a longtime priority of Mr Trump and his allies.

Mr Trump filed the suit months after leaving office, calling the action by the social media companies “illegal, shameful censorship of the American people”.

Twitter, Facebook and Google are all private companies, and users must agree to their terms of service to use their products.

Under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, social media platforms are allowed to moderate their services by removing posts that, for instance, are obscene or violate the services’ own standards, so long as they are acting in “good faith”.

The law also generally exempts internet companies from liability for the material that users post.

But Mr 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 have it curtailed.

The Meta settlement comes after ABC News agreed last month to pay 15 million dollars (£12 million) towards Mr Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’s inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E Jean Carroll.

The network also agreed to pay one million dollars in legal fees to the law firm of Mr Trump’s lawyer, Alejandro Brito.

The settlement agreement describes ABC’s presidential library payment as a “charitable contribution”, with the money earmarked for a non-profit organisation that is being established in connection with the yet-to-be-built library.

The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the settlement.