JUST IN: ‘Woke’ Tech Giant Forced To Pay Trump Millions

One week after Google agreed to backtrack on policies that censored conservatives during the pandemic, another tech giant is forking over millions of dollars to President Donald Trump in a bid to settle his latest lawsuit.

YouTube, the second most-visited site on the internet behind Google, agreed on Monday to pay $24.5 million to Trump to settle allegations that he was unfairly banned from the platform following the Jan. 6, 2021, riots at the Capitol. The video-sharing service was one of a handful of tech companies that banned Trump’s personal accounts after they alleged he encouraged followers to become violent in confrontations with Capitol Police.

The deal makes Alphabet-owned YouTube the last of the three tech giants, behind Meta and X (formerly known as Twitter), to reach an agreement with Trump’s legal team for removing him from their platforms.

Of the funds, $22 million will go toward the Trust for the National Mall, which is “dedicated to restoring, preserving, and elevating the National Mall, to support the construction of the White House State Ballroom,” according to a copy of the deal obtained by the WSJ.

The remaining $2.5 million will go toward resolving complaints by other plaintiffs, including the American Conservative Union.

Trump celebrated news of the agreement on his own platform, writing on Truth Social, “This MASSIVE victory proves Big Tech censorship has consequences.”

Meta was the first of the big three to reach a deal, in which the Facebook owner paid Trump $25 million back in January. A $10 million settlement by X was completed the following month, CNN reported.

Together, the deals underscore the power Trump again wields from the White House. Legal analysts at the time argued that Trump’s ban was largely uncontestable, contending that social media platforms have the right to manage their own affairs.

Now, companies like Google and Facebook may find themselves the target of antitrust investigations or face denied acquisitions by regulators if they fall under Trump’s scrutiny. Executives have signaled they would rather settle quietly than risk penalties or denials worth potentially hundreds of billions of dollars.

In addition to reinstating Trump’s accounts, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, and X CEO Elon Musk all sat in the front row of the president’s inauguration. Facebook last week announced that it would roll back content moderation standards that Republicans had likened to censorship.

Some of the other pro-Trump accounts banned during the fallout from J6 included one by Dan Bongino, the deputy director of the FBI and former host of his own podcast. Google stated in its announcement last week that Bongino would be allowed back on the platform if he chooses to do so.