President Trump has signed settlement papers that are expected to require Meta Platforms to pay roughly $25 million to resolve a 2021 lawsuit Trump brought after the company suspended his accounts following the attacks on the U.S. Capitol that year, according to people familiar with the agreement.
Of that, $22 million will go toward a fund for Trump’s presidential library, with the rest going to legal fees and the other plaintiffs who signed onto the case. Meta won’t admit wrongdoing, the people said. Trump signed the settlement agreement Wednesday in the Oval Office.
Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Serious talks about the suit, which had seen little activity since the fall of 2023, began after Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg flew to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida to dine with him in November, according to the people familiar with the discussions. The dinner was one of several efforts by Zuckerberg and Meta to soften the relationship with Trump and the incoming administration. Meta also donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. Last year, Trump warned that Zuckerberg could go to prison if he tried to rig the election against him.
Toward the end of the November dinner, Trump raised the matter of the lawsuit, the people said. The president signaled that the litigation had to be resolved before Zuckerberg could be “brought into the tent,” one of the people said.
Weeks later, in early January, Zuckerberg returned to Mar-a-Lago for a full day of mediation. Trump was present for part of the session, though he stepped out at one point to be sentenced—appearing virtually—for covering up hush money paid to a porn star, one of the people said. He also golfed, reappearing in golf clothes and talking about the round he had just played, the person said….
The Meta lawsuit was one of a series of legal actions that Trump, freshly voted out of office, brought in July 2021 against social-media companies that suspended his accounts. He also sued Twitter, now renamed X, and YouTube, along with their corporate leaders. A federal judge dismissed the Twitter suit, and the Google suit was administratively closed in 2023 but could be reopened….
Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts were suspended in 2021 because of posts he made around Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob stormed the Capitol building. In the days leading up to the attacks and on Jan. 6, he repeatedly used the platforms to make false claims that he won the 2020 election and alleged widespread election fraud that was denied by the administration’s top election-security experts and attorneys.
Zuckerberg, at the time, said the risks of the president using the social-media platforms during that period “are simply too great” and then paused the president’s accounts for two weeks. The pause was subsequently lengthened. …