Meta has agreed to pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump against the company after it suspended his accounts following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, according to three people familiar with the matter, the Associated Press reports. It's the latest instance of a large corporation settling litigation with the president, who has threatened retribution on his critics and rivals. And the settlement comes as Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, have joined other large technology companies in trying to ingratiate themselves with the new Trump administration. Zuckerberg visited Trump in November at his private Florida club to try to mend fences with the incoming president, something other technology, business and government officials have done as well. At the dinner, Trump brought up the litigation and suggested they try to resolve it, kick-starting two months of negotiations between the parties, the people said. People familiar with the situation said that the terms of the agreement include $22 million going to the nonprofit that will become Trump’s future presidential library. The balance will go to legal fees and other litigants, they said.
Meta also made a $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural committee, and Zuckerberg was among several billionaires granted prime seating during 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. Before Trump’s inauguration, Meta announced it was dropping fact-checking on its platform — a longtime priority of Trump and his allies. Trump had filed the lawsuit against Meta months after his first term ended, calling the action by the social media companies “illegal, shameful censorship of the American people.” The Meta settlement comes after ABC News agreed last month to pay $15 million toward Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll.