Facebook owner Meta to pay Trump $25m to settle lawsuit over ban
2025-01-30
Category: economic

US President Donald Trump has signed a legal settlement that will see Facebook and Instagram owner Meta pay him roughly $25m (£20m).Trump sued the social media giant and its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, in 2021 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 US presidential elections.The settlement was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
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.After Trump's election victory in November, Mr Zuckerberg visited his Florida resort in Mar-a-Lago. The move was seen as evidence of an apparent thawing in their once frosty relations.The following month, Meta donated $1m to an inauguration fund for Trump.  Mr Zuckerberg was a guest at Trump's inauguration at the US Capitol earlier this month - seated in a row other global tech billionaires. For years, Trump had been highly critical of Mr Zuckerberg and Facebook - calling the platform "anti-Trump" in 2017.Their relationship 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 $44bn, 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.Mr 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, 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." 
'Major advantage'
Meta last week announced it was planning to spend as much as $65bn this year to expand its AI infrastructure. Zuckerberg on Wednesday acknowledged ongoing debate about how best to direct AI investments, but told investors that for his firm, which serves billions of people globally, big investments made sense. "I would bet the ability to build out that kind of infrastructure is going to be a major advantage - for both the quality of the service and being able to serve the scale we want to," he said. He said it would also be a critical year for the company in other areas, saying he this year would be key to determining whether sales of the company's smart glasses will take off as hoped.Zuckerberg has said he expects all glasses to be replaced by smart glasses within a decade, a prediction he repeated on Wednesday.He also spoke of plans to revive the "cultural relevance" of Facebook, the social media sight that launched his fortune but which has fallen out of favour compared to other offerings such as Instagram and tikTok.Zuckerberg also defended his recently announced decision to end fact-checking, saying he thought plans for community notes would be more effective.He said the company had seen no hit to advertiser demand as a result of its changes.
It reported more than $48bn in revenue in the last three months of 2024, up 21% from the same period the prior year.Though AI spending has weighed on the company, it still reported quarterly profit of more than $20bn, up 49% from a year ago.