Inset: Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta, makes a point during an appearance at SIGGRAPH 2024, the premier conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, Monday, July 29, 2024, in the Colorado Convention Center in downtown Denver (AP Photo/David Zalubowski). Background: Republican Candidate for President Donald Trump attends the Building America’s Future, Southeastern Pennsylvania Roundtable at the Drexelbrook Event Center on October 29, 2024 in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania (Matt Bishop/imageSPACE/Sipa USA via AP Images).
The social media company Meta Platforms, Inc. will pay Donald Trump $25 million to settle a First Amendment lawsuit filed years ago in response to the president being suspended from Facebook over posts praising his supporters after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
On Wednesday, an attorney for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg filed a notice of settlement in the Northern District of California.
“I write to inform the Court that the parties have reached an agreement to settle the named plaintiffs’ individual claims and resolve this matter,” the terse filing reads. “The parties will file a joint stipulation of dismissal with prejudice in the coming days.”
On Thursday, the dollar amount agreed upon was reported by The Associated Press, citing “three people familiar with the matter.”
Following in ABC’s footsteps, the majority of the balance due — some $22 million — will go toward funding Trump’s eventual presidential library, according to the AP. The remainder will reportedly be used to pay lawyers and other litigants.
Facebook quickly suspended Trump on Jan. 7, 2021, in response to two posts casting doubt on the integrity of the 2020 election.
In the first post, Trump directly addressed his supporters in a video rife with false claims and praise. He said the presidential election was “stolen from us.” He also said: “we love you” and “you’re very special.”
In the second post, he wrote: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly unfairly treated for so long.”
On Jan. 21, 2021, the ban was referred to the Facebook Oversight Board — Facebook’s so-called “Supreme Court” which was created and funded by the company to act as a neutral third-party arbiter of the platform’s decisions concerning content moderation.
By May 2021, the board addressed the ban, issuing a ruling that Trump had violated Facebook’s community standards and guidelines in a “severe” way. At the same time, however, the board also rebuked Facebook’s censors for failing to adhere to a standardized set of rules and procedures in imposing an “arbitrary” and “indefinite” suspension.
Trump’s lawsuit highlighted the internal contradictions at play.
“Facebook’s own Oversight Board concluded that the … indefinite deplatforming of President Trump lacked any basis in its existing, consistently applied community standards,” the complaint reads.
Stylized as a First Amendment and Section 230 action, Trump’s lawsuit was originally filed in the Southern District of Florida before moving to federal court in the Golden State. The lead defendant was initially Facebook before the company changed names and effectively became a subsidiary of itself in October 2021.
“Defendant Facebook has increasingly engaged in impermissible censorship resulting from threatened legislative action, a misguided reliance upon Section 230 of the Communications Act, 47 U.S.C. § 230, and willful participation in joint activity with federal actors,” the original petition reads. “Defendant Facebook’s status thus rises beyond that of a private company to that of a state actor. As such, Defendant is constrained by the First Amendment right to free speech in the censorship decisions it makes regarding its Users.”
Section 230 contains ironclad safe harbors for websites that allow other uses to engage in speech online. Those protections, a persistent piece of legal insulation, have been called “Better Than the First Amendment” by internet law scholars and have long been a favorite Trump bugbear. The lasting legacy of the statute — a section contained in the largely-struck down Communications Decency Act of 1996 — is the promotion of online content moderation.
The Meta lawsuit was filed simultaneously with substantially similar lawsuits filed against Twitter (now X) and YouTube.
While some legal wrangling on the merits ensued — largely over Section 230 issues — the case more or less languished in procedural limbo as the judge initially overseeing the matter recused, the case was reassigned, and various lawyers dropped on and off the docket.
As Law&Crime previously reported, a wide array of law professors and attorneys criticized Trump’s efforts at the time as a not “serious” filing and a “stunt” that was unlikely to succeed. Among the criticisms leveled at the 45th and 47th president was the fact of the lawsuit being formatted as a class action and efforts to bypass the “state action” doctrine that applies to all First Amendment cases.
While the legal issues were never hashed out, Trump’s 2024 victory at the ballot box ultimately made short work of the litigation. And, in one sense, the class action resulted in what most class action lawsuits are designed to achieve: a substantial sum of money.
