Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta will pay roughly $25 million to settle a 2021 lawsuit brought by President Donald Trump, who accused the platform of unlawfully suspending his accounts after the Capitol insurrection.
The Wall Street Journal reported that most of the money will fund Trump’s presidential library, with the rest covering legal fees and other plaintiffs. Meta won’t admit wrongdoing, and experts widely agree Trump was unlikely to win: the judge in this case, like the one in a similar failed suit against Twitter, appeared openly skeptical of his arguments.
But Meta arguably had more to lose by winning this one. Tech and media companies, eager to avoid conflict with the new administration, have recently settled a string of Trump lawsuits they probably would have won in court. According to the Journal, this settlement, in particular, grew out of Zuckerberg’s efforts to cozy up to Trump last November. The paper’s sources said the then-president-elect signaled during a Mar-a-Lago dinner that the Meta boss would need to resolve the suit before he could ever be allowed “into the tent.”
Zuckerberg is not the only executive eager for that particular invitation. In late November, lawyers for X informed a California appeals court that they planned to settle a similar lawsuit they’d fought as recently as August. Weeks later, ABC News paid $15 million to settle a defamation case it seemed likely to win. And executives at Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS News, have reportedly discussed settling the lawsuit Trump filed last fall over 60 Minutes’ October interview with former vice president Kamala Harris.
Some companies in Trump’s crosshairs are still vowing to fight back. Newspaper chain Gannett, which owns the Des Moines Register, is contesting Trump’s claim that the paper committed consumer fraud when it published an ultimately inaccurate poll ahead of the 2024 election. Meanwhile, the Pulitzer Board has asked a judge to pause a Trump defamation suit in connection with the prizes it awarded for 2016 election coverage—mirroring the president’s own legal delay tactics.
Regardless of how these cases end, however, experts warn of lasting damage. Last week, the editorial board of the New Jersey Law Journal cautioned that the ABC settlement set a dangerous precedent and encouraged “more groundless legal actions” against media companies. In The Atlantic, Richard Painter, a former White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, predicted that the settlements would “cow” the media and come to represent a type of extortion.
“It looks like a bribe and a signal to every company that corruption is the name of the game,” Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren told the Wall Street Journal in a statement. “After Meta pays to play, what does Mark Zuckerberg expect as a return on this investment?”