Meta To Pay Trump $25m Over Account Suspension

United States President Donald Trump has signed a legal settlement that will result in Facebook and Instagram parent company, Meta paying out roughly $25m (£20m).

Trump in 2021 sued the social media giant and its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg over the suspension of his accounts after the 6 January Capitol riots that year.

In July 2024, Meta lifted the final restrictions on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in the lead-up to the US presidential elections.

Around $22m of the settlement will go to a fund for Trump’s presidential library.

The balance will be used to cover legal costs and the other plaintiffs who signed on to the lawsuit.

Meta will not admit wrongdoing. The company suspended Trump’s accounts in 2021 and said that it would ban him from the platforms for at least two years.

Following Trump’s election win in November, Zuckerberg visited his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. This gesture was interpreted as a sign of a possible warming of their previously cool relationship.

The following month, Meta donated $1m to an inauguration fund for Trump.

LEADERSHIP reports that Zuckerberg was a guest at Trump’s inauguration at the US Capitol earlier this month, seated near other global tech billionaires.

For years, Trump had been highly critical of Zuckerberg and Facebook, calling the platform “anti-Trump” in 2017.

The relationship between both parties soured further after the president’s accounts were banned. He called Facebook an “enemy of the people” in March 2024.

Twitter, which is now named X and owned by Trump ally Elon Musk, also “permanently” suspended the president from its platform.

After buying the firm for $44billion, Musk reinstated Trump’s account in 2022 after a poll he ran on the site narrowly backed the move.

Separately on Wednesday, Meta defended its $65bn investment in artificial intelligence (AI) after tech stocks were rocked in the wake of Chinese AI app DeepSeek’s sudden rise.

Zuckerberg told investors there was a lot to learn from DeepSeek, but it was too soon to have “a really strong opinion” about what the app means for the future of AI.

“If anything, I think the recent news has only strengthened our conviction that this is right thing for us to be focused on,” he added.

Many US tech stocks sank this week after DeepSeek surged in popularity, though Meta’s has bucked this trend by rising.

The stock was up in after-hours trading after it posted better-than-expected financial results on Wednesday.

However, questions remain about what advances in Chinese AI will mean for the US AI market generally considering DeepSeek’s claim it was developed at a fraction of the cost of its US rivals.

Zuckerberg said in a call to investors following the results on Wednesday that DeepSeek’s rise strengthened his conviction in his company’s embrace of “open-source” AI.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, took a different tack from many US companies by releasing an open-source AI model for free.

Zuckerberg on Wednesday said he thought that approach was important to keeping the US at the cutting edge, as countries around the world compete to become the key players in the still-emerging industry.

“There’s going to be an open source standard globally and I think for our own national advantage it’s important that it’s an American standard,” he said.

“We take that seriously. We want to build the AI system that people around the world are using.”