Meta agrees to Pay $25M to Resolve Trump Lawsuit over Ban

Donald Trump has signed a legal agreement that will make Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, pay about $25 million.

In 2021, Trump sued the social media giant and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, after his accounts were suspended following the January 6 Capitol riots.

In July 2024, Meta lifted the remaining restrictions on Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts before the U.S. presidential elections.

The Wall Street Journal first reported the news of the settlement.

The rest will go to an attorney's fee and other plaintiffs in the case. Meta has agreed to settle without admitting anything wrong. In 2021, the company suspended Trump's accounts and it included banning him for at least two years.

After Trump's election victory in November, Mark Zuckerberg visited his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, a gesture that was seen as signaling a thaw in their previously strained relationship.

The following month, Meta contributed $1 million to a fund for Trump's inauguration. Zuckerberg also attended the inauguration at the U.S. Capitol earlier this month, sitting alongside other global tech billionaires.

For years, Trump had himself criticized Zuckerberg and Facebook, terming the platform "anti-Trump" in 2017.

Their relationship became even more strained after Trump's accounts were suspended, with the former president calling Facebook an "enemy of the people" in March 2024.

Twitter, now known as X and owned by Trump ally Elon Musk, also "permanently" suspended the president's account.

After purchasing the platform for $44 billion, Musk reinstated Trump's account in 2022 following a poll on the site that narrowly supported the decision.

In a separate development on Wednesday, Meta defended its $65 billion investment in artificial intelligence (AI) after tech stocks were shaken by the rapid rise of the Chinese AI app DeepSeek.

Mark Zuckerberg said that although much could be learnt from DeepSeek, it was still too early to form a "strong opinion" about what the app boded for the future of AI.

"If anything, I think the news recently has really only reaffirmed our belief that this is the thing we should be focusing on," he said.

Most of the stocks plunged this week when DeepSeek went viral, except Meta's, which has defied the trend and has gone up.

The stock had increased in after-hours trading on Wednesday after announcing better-than-expected financials.

But it remains to be seen how improvements in Chinese AI will affect the US AI market at large, especially considering that DeepSeek says it was developed at a small fraction of the cost of its American competitors.

In a call with investors following the results, Mark Zuckerberg said that DeepSeek's rapid ascent only reinforced his confidence in his company's commitment to "open-source" AI.

Meta, for instance, comes as the owner of Facebook and Instagram and Whatsapp. Unlike some US companies, Meta made open-source AI accessible to the entire world free.

On Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that he considers this approach will be key for keeping the U.S. top in the current race between world nations for controlling the new age AI 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."