YouTube Bends the Knee

Welcome to the era of Big-Tech capitulation.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/10/youtube-trump-settlement/684431/

https://archive.ph/XWWEY


Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Andrew Harnik / Getty.

If you measure only in dollars (and not in dignity), YouTube got a pretty good deal. This week, the Google-owned platform paid $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit brought by President Donald Trump after the company suspended his channel six days after the January 6 riot at the Capitol. At the time, YouTube said it was “concerned about the ongoing potential for violence.” (Trump’s account was eventually reinstated in March 2023.) The terms of the settlement will direct $22 million to the Trust for the National Mall, a nonprofit group that is raising money to finance an addition to the White House. Most creators are lucky if they get a gold plaque from YouTube; Trump’s getting a new ballroom.

This is just the latest example of major tech companies bowing to Trump. Earlier this year, Meta and X settled similar lawsuits with Trump over suspending his accounts, paying $25 million and $10 million, respectively. These three companies alone have collectively paid Trump and his associates $59.5 million for the sin of enforcing the rules of their own privately held companies. There’s also Amazon, which made a reported $40 million deal with Melania Trump on a documentary project. Plus personal donations to Trump from various tech CEOs, including Apple’s Tim Cook, who gave $1 million to his inaugural fund.

All of this amounts to a rounding error for the tech giants—averaged out, YouTube made more than $107 million from ad revenue every single day last quarter—but these are still acts of profound obsequiousness and corporate cowardice. There are any number of reasons they may have chosen to pay up: Perhaps the tech elite have become genuinely red-pilled, fear regulation, or don’t want to lose out on government contracts. They have good reason to worry about personal retribution (last year, Trump accused Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg of plotting against him in the 2020 presidential election and said that he would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he did so again). But in any case, by settling with Trump over these suspensions, the companies are effectively arguing that their content-moderation decisions following the insurrection were wrong. They are also arguing, in effect, that the government has the right to tell business owners what they can and cannot allow on their own platforms—a weak stance generally, and a weak stance on free speech specifically.

This is embarrassing for them, but they get something out of it, too. By settling, the companies can pivot toward dispensing with the work of moderation altogether. The decision to suspend Trump can serve for them as a cautionary tale of what happens when the platforms are made to make difficult editorial decisions. They’re given an excuse to take a lighter touch. They double down on the idea that they aren’t truly publishers, which reinforces their long-standing arguments that the owners of social platforms should not be held liable for what happens on the sites they run. And they attempt to do so with a straight face even as they tune their algorithms to alter what content users see.

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