Pays ten million dollars

X settles dispute with Trump over account blocking

Donald Trump and X-CEO Elon Musk are new best friends, but have so far been at loggerheads legally.(Bild: APA/Getty Images via AFP/GETTY IMAGES/Brandon Bell)

The short message service X wants to pay around ten million dollars to settle a legal dispute with US President Donald Trump. This would make X (then still Twitter) the second social media platform to settle with Trump over the blocking of his accounts following the storming of the US Capitol by his supporters in January 2021.

Trump's team had considered letting the legal dispute with X expire given the president's close relationship with Musk, the Wall Street Journal reported. Ultimately, however, a settlement was agreed. Last month, Facebook parent company Meta announced that it would pay around 25 million dollars to settle a lawsuit filed by Trump.

Trump had filed a lawsuit against Twitter, now known as X, Facebook and Alphabet in July 2021, claiming that conservative views were being unlawfully suppressed. Twitter prevailed in the first instance. Most recently, an appeal was filed - and in a hearing in autumn 2023, the arguments of the Trump side met with skepticism from the judges there as well. However, the appeal was withdrawn at the beginning of this week, according to court documents.

Storming of the Capitol in 2021 as a trigger
In January 2021, Trump's supporters interrupted a session of the US parliament at which Joe Biden's election victory and Trump's defeat in the presidential election were to be sealed. Trump had previously incited his supporters during an appearance with repeated false claims that the election had been stolen from him through massive electoral fraud. During the attack, he initially refrained from calling on the attackers to withdraw from the Capitol.

The online platforms justified the block with the risk of incitement to violence. Meta initially blocked Trump for two years, while Twitter emphasized that his return to the platform was not possible, citing its own rules. But when Musk bought Twitter for around 44 billion dollars in the fall of 2022, he reactivated Trump's account. Meta lifted the ban after two years in January 2023.

Musk invested more than 250 million dollars in Trump's election campaign last year and became one of his closest confidants. Trump instructed him to cut government spending. It is expected that Trump's lawyers will now also seek a settlement with Google.