Key points
- Met suspended Donald Trump’s accounts following Jan 6, 2021 attack on Capitol
- Zuckerberg visited Trump in November at his private Florida club to try to mend fences
- Before Trump’s inauguration, Meta announced it was dropping fact-checking
ISLAMABAD: 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 January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, according to three people familiar with the matter.
According to AP, 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 CEO, 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 Wednesday to discuss the agreement. Two of the people said terms of the agreement include $22 million going to the non-profit that will become Trump’s future presidential library. The balance will go to legal fees and other litigants, they said.
Mending fences
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.
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 filed the lawsuit months after his first term ended, 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.
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But 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 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. The network also agreed to pay $1 million in legal fees to the law firm of Trump’s attorney, Alejandro Brito.
