October 1, 2025 - 7:00am
Donald Trump keeps winning. $25 million from Meta. $10 million from X/Twitter. Now, $25 million from YouTube.
In recent months, the President has been raking in big sums as his legal teams have gone after those who ejected him from their platforms in the wake of the January 6 riots.
Victory tastes sweet. But what, exactly, has been won? The Trumpists would call it a triumph for free speech, a vindication after years of unfair treatment. But that’s not entirely the case. What it really reveals is the grinding machinery of corporate interests — tectonic plates of power colliding until a bolus of dollars is squeezed out. It sheds no light on the politics of yesterday, but lays bare everything about the politics of today.
Take the most recent settlement. In January 2021, Donald Trump received a “strike” on his YouTube account for violating the platform’s rules — the same sanction that can befall anyone who has clicked the “Accept Terms of Service” box. By 8 January, Meta and Twitter had already suspended his account, citing “public safety” concerns. For a few days, YouTube was left hanging loose, but by 13 January, it had decided to ban him too.
What was the exact nature of his YouTube infringement? We still don’t know. Nor do we know about what particular video the strike was against. The account was simply frozen out, and not resumed.
Trump’s lawyers focused most of their argument on the fact that he was more than an ordinary user: that social media was a kind of “public square”, in which a prominent political actor had a special right to speak. They hinted that these companies were operating in lock-step, and that by collectively closing themselves off to him, they were indulging in “political discrimination”.
It’s an interesting argument, but political discrimination is not a concept generally recognised by US courts. And, had it come down to it, it is unlikely Trump’s team would have prevailed anyway. So why did they settle? Because the world seemed fixed, and Trump seemed doomed. They assumed he was a spent political force.
His return to office flipped their calculations: suddenly Big Tech firms feared their internal communications could be subpoenaed. Unflattering messages about the former president could easily have made front-page news, with all the predictable fallout. At best, the companies might have hoped for a carefully managed PR response; at worst, they risked a sustained conservative boycott that would have hit their bottom line hard.
Big Tech, of course, has sharp survival instincts. It stays close to the powers that be. Just as Zuckerberg grew his hair, donned a medallion, and chatted with Rogan about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, the platforms themselves cultivate legislative agendas they hope to see realised. Looking back from today, 2021 feels like another country. The mood has shifted so completely that revisiting the tone of those days now invites a certain cultural cringe under the new regime.
In effect, the tech firms are making burnt offerings to their new gods: $25 million here, $10 million there. Kiss the ring and go. After all, Trump, much like them, is a figure who only swims forward. Having sealed that loyalty, he too will move on.
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