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NEW: Meta Reaches Multi-Million-Dollar Settlement With Trump Over 2021 Ban

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Facebook parent company Meta announced Wednesday that it will be paying $25 million to settle a lawsuit with President Donald Trump, which was brought after he was banned from Facebook and Instagram in the aftermath of the January 6 Capitol protests in 2021.

Meta filed notice of the settlement in a federal court in San Francisco on Wednesday, just about four years after the lawsuit was initially brought. Meta spokesman Andy Stone later confirmed that the platform will be paying a total of $25 million to settle the claim, $22 million of which will be going towards a fund for Trump’s future presidential library. The remaining balance will go towards paying legal fees and other plaintiffs in the case.

Stone added that the settlement means the company will not have to admit to any wrongdoing. The White House has yet to offer an official comment, though a legal representative told Business Insider that the president signed the settlement in the Oval Office.

The story was first reported by the Wall Street Journal as Meta was set to report their quarterly earnings. While Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg did not comment on the settlement directly, he did say during the earnings call that 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,” Zuckerberg said. “And I am optimistic about the progress and innovation that this can unlock.”

Zuckerberg meets with President Donald Trump in 2017

The move comes as both Zuckerberg and the company have been improving relations with the Trump Administration after vehemently opposing the president in his first term. Zuckerberg met with then President-elect Trump at his Mar-A-Lago estate earlier this year and later attended his inauguration.

The tech leader — who spent tens of millions of dollars on ballot harvesting efforts that played a key role in former President Biden’s victory in 2020 — has privately and publicly voiced disillusionment with left-wing politics in recent months.

“In conversations over the past few years with friends, colleagues and advisers, Mr. Zuckerberg has expressed cynicism about politics after years of bad experiences in Washington,” the New York Times reported earlier this year.  “He and others at the top of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, believed that both parties loathed technology and that trying to continue engaging with political causes would only draw further scrutiny to their company”

According to the report, Zuckerberg expressed frustration with blowback towards himself and the company as a whole as a result of his massive involvement with mail-in ballot harvesting in 2020, while attending the Allen and Company conference back in June. He also expressed regret over hiring employees who convinced him to shift to the left on political issues.

On the policy front, Zuckerberg recently announced that Meta would be discontinuing its “fact-checking” services across all platforms. They have since been replaced with a “community notes” feature, which allows users to add context or links to claims that may be untrue or misleading. Users can then vote on the claims themselves, rather than “fact checkers” having unchecked ability to alter or limit the visibility of posts. The system is modeled off Elon Musk’s X, which implemented the community notes feature in 2022.

Meta’s settlement with Trump comes just weeks after ABC News announced a multi-million dollar settlement with the president over false claims made by network host George Stephanopoulos. The host falsely claimed that Trump was found liable of “rape” in a dubious case brought by author and left-wing activist E. Jean Carroll.

The network agreed to pay $15 million as a charitable contribution to the fund for Trump’s future presidential library. ABC News also agreed to pay for Trump’s legal fees and issued a formal apology.

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