YouTube to pay $22 million for White House ballroom to settle lawsuit from Trump

YouTube has agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit brought by President Trump, who sued the video-sharing platform and its chief executive for temporarily suspending Mr. Trump’s account after the 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, court papers filed Monday show.

The bulk of the money is slated to go to a planned White House ballroom backed by Mr. Trump.

The settlement, filed in the U.S. District Court in Northern California, ends a four-year legal battle between the company and Mr. Trump, who has also recently settled with Meta and X after suing the Big Tech firms for similar suspensions. Mr. Trump’s accounts on Meta and X were restored in 2022, and his YouTube account was restored in 2023. 

In January, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, agreed to pay $25 million to Mr. Trump to settle a 2021 lawsuit over its own suspension of his accounts following the Capitol attack. A month later, X agreed to pay Mr. Trump $10 million to settle its lawsuit, which was filed before billionaire Trump ally Elon Musk bought the platform. 

The lawsuit against YouTube argued that the suspension violated Mr. Trump’s First Amendment rights because it was allegedly done “in response to coercion of the federal government.” Attorneys for the tech firm had called that argument “meritless” in a 2021 court filing, and said forcing the platform to host Mr. Trump without any restrictions “would conflict with YouTube’s own First Amendment rights.”

In settling the lawsuit, YouTube and its parent company, Google parent Alphabet, agreed to pay $22 million to Mr. Trump, all of which will be directed into the Trust for the National Mall, a fund that is “dedicated to restoring, preserving, and elevating that National Mall” and “to support the construction of the White House State Ballroom” that Mr. Trump is building.

Some $2.5 million will go to the other plaintiffs in the case whose accounts were removed from the site, including the American Conservative Union.  

Trump attorney John Coale told CBS News, “Glad it’s over,” noting that the settlements in Mr. Trump’s cases against tech companies have added up to around $60 million.

A representative for Alphabet did not comment on the settlement.

The Trump administration announced in July that a 90,000-square-foot ballroom with a seated capacity for 650 people will be constructed in the White House’s East Wing. 

CBS News reported earlier this month that corporate and individual donors have pledged nearly $200 million to cover construction costs, and fundraising is ongoing. Google, R.J. Reynolds, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin, Palantir and NextEra Energy have donated, sources told CBS News, and so have firms in the tech, manufacturing, banking and health industries.

Mr. Trump has cultivated closer ties with tech companies since returning to office. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos attended his inauguration in January, and Musk led his administration’s Department of Government Efficiency for months.

Arden Farhi and

Jennifer Jacobs

contributed to this report.