US President Donald Trump has signed a settlement that is expected to see Meta pay him roughly $25m (£20m), BBC reports sources familiar with the agreement.
In 2021, Trump sued the Facebook and Instagram owners for suspending his accounts after the 6 January Capitol riots.
In July 2024, Meta lifted the final restrictions on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in preparation for the US presidential elections.
Meta did not immediately respond to a BBC request for comment. The settlement was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
According to US media reports, around $22m of the settlement will go to a fund for Trump’s presidential library.
The balance will reportedly cover legal costs and the other plaintiffs who signed the lawsuit. Meta will not admit wrongdoing.
The company suspended Trump’s accounts in 2021 and said it would ban him from the platforms for at least two years.
Twitter, now named X and owned by Trump ally Elon Musk, also “permanently” suspended the president from its platform.
After buying the firm for $44bn, Musk reinstated Trump’s account in 2022 after a poll he ran on the site narrowly backed the move.
Separately on Wednesday, Meta defended its $65bn investment in artificial intelligence (AI) after tech stocks were rocked in the wake of Chinese AI app DeepSeek’s sudden rise.
Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told investors there was a lot to learn from DeepSeek, but it was too soon to have “a really strong opinion” about what the app means for the future of AI.
“If anything, I think the recent news has only strengthened our conviction that this is right thing for us to be focused on,” he added.
Many US tech stocks sank this week after DeepSeek surged in popularity, though Meta’s has bucked this trend by rising.
The stock was up in after-hours trading after it posted better-than-expected financial results on Wednesday.
However, questions remain about what advances in Chinese AI will mean for the US AI market generally considering DeepSeek’s claim it was developed at a fraction of the cost of its US rivals.
In a call to investors following the results on Wednesday, Zuckerberg said that DeepSeek’s rise strengthened his conviction in his company’s embrace of “open-source” AI.
Meta, parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, took a different tack from many US companies by releasing an open source AI model for free.
Zuckerberg on Wednesday said he thought that approach was essential to keeping the US at the cutting edge, as countries worldwide compete to become the key players in the still-emerging industry.
“There’s going to be an open source standard globally and I think for our own national advantage it’s important that it’s an American standard,” he said.
“We take that seriously. We want to build the AI system that people around the world are using.”
He said the company had seen no hit to advertiser demand due to its changes.
It reported more than $48bn in revenue in the last three months of 2024, up 21% from the same period in the prior year.
Though AI spending has affected the company, it still reported a quarterly profit of more than $20bn, up 49% from the previous year.
