US President Donald Trump has signed a deal that will see Facebook and Instagram owner Meta pay out around 25 million US dollars after Trump sued the social media giant and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2021 over the blocking of his accounts following the 6th of January riots at the Capitol that year, on Wednesday, the 29th of January, reports the BBC.
In July 2024, ahead of the US presidential election, Meta lifted all restrictions on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts.
Around 22 million US dollars will go to the Trump Presidential Library Foundation, while the remainder will be used to cover legal costs and paid to other plaintiffs.
Meta does not have to admit wrongdoing.
After Trump won the election, Mark Zuckerberg visited his resort in Florida, indicating an improvement in the strained relationship. The following month, Meta donated one million US dollars to Trump’s inauguration fund and Zuckerberg attended the event sitting next to other tech billionaires.
Trump has long criticised Zuckerberg and Facebook, calling the platform “anti-Trump” in 2017. Their relationship deteriorated after Trump’s accounts were blocked and in 2024, he called Facebook “the enemy of the people”.
Separately on Wednesday, Zuckerberg defended Meta’s 65 billion US dollars investment in artificial intelligence (AI) after the sudden rise of Chinese app DeepSeek shook the tech stock market,
saying that despite the market reaction, “the recent news has only reinforced our belief that this is the right thing to focus on.”
He told investors that there was much to learn from DeepSeek, but said it was too early to form a “really firm opinion” on its impact.
Zuckerberg acknowledged that discussions on investing in MI are ongoing but said that investing heavily in Meta makes sense because it provides services to billions of people around the world.
As part of this investment, Meta plans to increase its AI workforce and build a 2GW data centre large enough to house a significant part of Manhattan.
“I can bet that the ability to build this kind of infrastructure will be a big advantage…,” he said.
He also said that this year is an important one for the company, in particular to see if sales of smart glasses will be successful. Zuckerberg has said he expects all glasses to be replaced by smart glasses within a decade, a prediction he repeated on Wednesday.
He also discussed plans to make Facebook culturally relevant again, as it has lost popularity to platforms such as Instagram and TikTok.
He also defended his decision to stop fact-checking, saying that community notes would be more effective.
Meta earned 48 billion US dollars in the last quarter of 2024, up 21% year-on-year.