Donald Trump is indisputably the biggest dissembler in world history.

In merely four years, The Washington Post found he lied 30,573 times — and he surely surpassed this dubious number in his four years out of office. Unfortunately, our nation’s deep dive into disinformation is about to get significantly worse. In the run-up to Trump’s inauguration, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced it was jettisoning fact checkers. In the name of “free speech,” America is about to be drowned in a fetid sea of false speech.

Wired reported that Meta now appears to permit users to accuse transgender or gay people of being mentally ill because of their gender expression and sexual orientation.

This morally repellent decision by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is shamelessly brown-nosing Trump, spotlights the grievous societal harm caused by social media. It also brings into sharp focus the need to strictly regulate this nefarious industry before it further disintegrates free, democratic nations.

If you think social media is harmless, I suggest you pay attention to the recent coup in South Korea, where President Yoon Suk Yeol​ was impeached after declaring martial law, and quickly reversing course after a public outcry. Mirroring the Jan. 6 insurrection in the United States, with Yoon’s extremist supporters shrieking “stop the steal,” South Korea’s renegade president nearly ended democracy by leaning on his fervent right wing supporters radicalized by social media.

“Yoon’s ​is likely the world’s first ​insurrection instigated by algorithm addictions,” said Hong Sung-guk, a former lawmaker and columnist. The New York Times reported:

About 53​% of South Koreans say they ​consume news on YouTube, higher than an average of 30% in ​46 countries​ surveyed, according to a 2023 report by Korea Press Foundation.​

Analysts worry that algorithm-fueled information bubbles, with people continually served more of the type of content they have expressed interest in by watching, are helping divide the nation.​ The language and conspiracy theories Yoon and his supporters adopted mirror ​those purveyed by right-wing YouTubers.

Sound familiar?

It's time we had a serious debate about banning social media algorithms. If we ban heroin and crack cocaine from being sold in stores, why do we allow greedy companies to profit from addicting people to online political extremism?

Facebook, for example, helped Trump win in 2016 by allowing the Russians to flood the site with Putin propaganda, designed to hurt Hillary Clinton and get Americans to hate each other. It worked.

A report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III found “Russia used email leaks, propaganda and social media to stoke societal divisions” in an effort to undermine the U.S. elections.

Social media is also responsible for lowering the self-esteem of our children, frequently leading to severe depression and dysfunction. If that weren’t bad enough, social media sites are occasionally complicit in genocide. The Holocaust Memorial Museum wrote:

Recent cases — including Sri Lanka, Burma, India, and Ethiopia — have raised alarm surrounding social media’s influence on large-scale, group-targeted violence. From spreading disinformation and hate speech, to helping perpetrators target people associated with certain groups or opinions, to enabling coordination of mob attacks, there seem to be multiple ways social media platforms — such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram — could fuel or exacerbate atrocity risks.

If social media causes societal decay and division, expands hate groups and terrorist cells, creates political instability, harms teenagers and sometimes leads to genocide how do we justify not regulating it?

I’m old enough to remember the awful crack epidemic, but the effects of social media are decidedly worse. Sure, the drug epidemic sent broken people to the crack house, but it didn’t cause them to break into the House of Representatives to stop the legal transfer of presidential power.

To contain the online monster, we can start by banning social media algorithms. Right now, if a lonely teenager stumbles upon a nazi social media post, and reads the content out of curiosity, the platform will start sending the impressionable youth similar bigoted content.

This unregulated process often creates a trip down a dangerous rabbit hole. It can lead to your child becoming trapped in a narrow disinformation bubble that distorts reality and encourages anti-social behavior. And just like that — Presto — a new extremist has been minted and society suffers the consequences. This same process often occurs for senior citizens who fall prey to paranoid right wing online fever swamps, reinforced by Fox News.

Those who oppose banning algorithms would scream “free speech!” However, algorithms have the opposite effect of distributing varying opinions. They force feed predictable content, prevent exposure to new ideas and create insular communities with hive mentalities. Preventing algorithms from corrupting minds has no impact on free speech, as a user can still search for desired content on their own.

What avaricious corporations are truly afraid of is they won’t maximize profit if they can’t hook unsuspecting users on harmful content by irresponsibly placing it in front of their faces. (The longer social media sites keep users online, the more ad revenue they collect.)

Indeed, banning algorithms would greatly expand free speech. Currently, sites like X, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook have too much power over who gets heard and who succeeds in the online marketplace. If the corporate overlords don’t like one’s viewpoint, the speaker is often shadow-banned and fades into obscurity with no recourse.

This is too much power and influence for unethical corporations and their sketchy leaders to wield. With social media sites considered the new public square, each user should have an equal opportunity to be heard and to let the free market decide winners and losers. The current system, unfortunately, heavily favors the promotion of corporate-worshipping right-wing bloviators whose undemocratic, socially oppressive views are detrimental to democracy.

Exhibit A of algorithm abuse is X’s thin-skinned owner Elon Musk. He laughably presents himself as a paragon of free speech, yet liberally bans, suspends or silences users who disagree with his opinions or criticize his often-objectionable behavior. Forbes reports that account suspensions have tripled on X, formerly Twitter, since “free speech” icon Elon Musk took over the company.

No, Musk isn’t interested in sharing diverse points of view. Instead, he’s created a toxic platform that is deliberately designed to give him the world’s biggest bullhorn in which he can shout-down and bully his detractors, while debasing public debate.

For example, in 2023, Elon Musk was attending the Super Bowl with Fox News Founder Rupert Murdoch. During the game he learned that a pre-game Tweet from President Joe Biden received triple his views. An apoplectic Musk left the game early to fly home to San Francisco, where he angrily summoned approximately 80 engineers to tweak the platform to ensure his online missives received the most views.

The Guardian reported, “engineers then deployed a new algorithm that artificially inflated Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000, ensuring that more than 90% of Musk’s 128.9m followers see them.”

Clearly, Musk is a cheater who doesn’t give two shits about free speech and is happy rigging the game in his favor. He unscrupulously leverages his multi-billions to unfairly exploit algorithms to ensure the primacy of his message at the expense of competitors.

The result of Musk’s egotistical chicanery has been devastating for society, with the world inundated by the bizarre musings of a chronically dishonest, socially awkward, drug-addled, emotionally stunted man-child who shows increasing signs of mental instability. His serial flagrant algorithm abuse and multiplying mistruths have not only perverted American politics, but is increasingly polluting other nations, most recently the United Kingdom.

Trump is another gas lighter who loves to spout “freedom of speech” when it serves his purposes. In America, elections are the ultimate example of free expression — and when Trump didn’t like the outcome in 2016, he staged a coup to stay in power. The only opinion he respects is his own and has no interest in free speech unless it consolidates his power.

To be fair, I am on social media daily and enjoy its benefits. Facebook, for instance, is like an international phone book where one can reconnect with old friends and keep track of new ones. I enjoy viewing puffy cats and flat faced pooches on Instagram or catching the latest dance craze on TikTok.

Nonetheless, with the encroachment of delinquent algorithms, the bad we now find online often outweighs the good. Today’s social media experience is as likely to put your child in contact with pedophiles as cute pets. It allows paranoid extremists to traffic in deadly conspiracies and dangerous lies. This problem will greatly intensify with social media titans helping provide much of the $200 million for Trump’s inauguration committee.

It's time to ban algorithms that destroy social cohesion and give too much power to those who control the digital public square. Facebook’s abandonment of fact checkers is a warning that we will all face the music unless decisive action is taken to rein in aberrant social media companies and their damaging algorithms.

Wayne Besen is the executive director of Delray Beach-based LGBTQ nonprofit organization Truth Wins Out. He is the former spokesperson of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ rights organization. His Substack is not paywalled.