Europe's race to rearm is pointless if its adversaries are waging war online

The Guardian

15-04-2025

Europe is scrambling to remilitarise. The European Commission is raising a €150bn (£129bn) defence fund and is calling on EU countries to invest €650bn (£561bn) more. Germany has cast aside its government debt limit to invest hundreds of billions of euros in defence. Poland will train every male of fighting age for battle, and envisages an army 500,000 strong. Latvia's president has urged the rest of Europe to conscript citizens, as Latvia does. Even neutral Ireland is buying combat jets. No wonder Europe's defence industry is booming. In just a few months, the share prices of several big weapons manufacturers have nearly doubled and doubled again. But, despite this new martial pulse, the continent is still sleepwalking towards disaster.
Europe can harden its shell and sharpen its claws, but it has done little to protect its soft underbelly against political manipulation. The US is capitulating to Russia over Ukraine because of political implosion at home, not military defeat. This story has been repeated many times in Europe's history. Thucydides recounted how ancient Athens and Sparta sowed discord and cultivated traitors in each other's camps. Europe's leaders must remember this lesson and confront three new realities.
First, the US is turning autocratic and hostile to its allies. The Dark Enlightenment, once a dream of a few Silicon Valley types, appears to be unfolding. JD Vance's speech to the Munich Security Conference in February, in which he attacked Europe's political leaders' refusal to countenance far-right parties entering government, showed that Elon Musk's boosting of Germany's AfD and other far-right campaigners across the EU enjoys official US support. Ditto Donald Trump's St Patrick's Day photo op with Conor McGregor. Absent a change of US policy, the EU must protect itself against American attempts to undermine Europe's liberal democracy.
Second, companies in this increasingly autocratic and hostile US control every major digital platform that Europeans use to debate and share news, with the exception of TikTok, which is Chinese. Even Europe's news organisations rely on Google and other US advertising technology companies for online revenue. Trump can humiliate or cripple the oligarchs who control these companies.
For example, just two days after he brought the US Federal Trade Commission under his direct control in February, the agency started to hunt alleged anti-Maga 'censorship' by tech platforms. He has other levers, such as the power to block or grant billion-dollar government contracts, as the Amazon boss, Jeff Bezos, found out when his company lost a $10bn (£7.6bn) contract in Trump's first term after the president's intervention.
The Trump grip is also personal: he openly threatened to throw Mark Zuckerberg in jail for the rest of his life. It is reasonable to assume that tech oligarchs will do what he tells them.
Third, big tech's manipulation machine is now a threat to Europe's democracy. Social media feeds tailored by big tech algorithms are now the primary source of information on political issues for Europeans aged 30 and under. YouTube, TikTok and Instagram all use 'recommender' algorithms to pick what each person sees in their feed. They monitor us to learn our intimate desires and fears, and use that insight to serve personalised feeds that keep us scrolling.
Algorithmic feeds effortlessly suppress trustworthy journalism, amplify some voices and censor others. For more than a decade, big tech's clumsy, revenue-optimised algorithms have accidentally pushed Europeans (and everyone else) to extremism. Now, with Trump in charge, Europe faces a new intentional algorithmic assault to boost authoritarians into power across the continent.
Brussels has been strangely indifferent to this moment of decision. Senior European Commission officials still speak of unhurried 'regulatory dialogues' with big tech firms. They point to investigations into the likes of Meta and X under the 2022 Digital Services Act. These are worthy but inadequate.
What we do in these next few months will determine whether Europe's liberal democracy survives or is for ever lost. Investing in defence will be for naught if foreign powers – whether the US, Russia, or China – can boost authoritarian collaborators within the EU's borders.
The EU must immediately switch off the tech companies' algorithms on its soil, at least until they are proven safe for democracy. Without that artificial amplification, extreme material will again have to compete with the deluge of cat videos and other things posted by people on digital platforms at that same instant. With X and other platforms upgraded to a pre-algorithm state, Musk's posts will no longer be forced in to people's feeds. We will still have digital platforms, but extremism will again be niche rather than the norm.
Ursula von der Leyen last year pledged to introduce a 'democracy shield' to protect Europe from foreign electoral manipulation. Von der Leyen's first step should be to shut down recommender algorithms. One way of doing that is to put political pressure on Ireland, which is responsible for enforcing Europe's tough data law on most big tech firms but has not delivered. Instead, Dublin, according to the whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams, has been the tech industry's lapdog. But von der Leyen should activate the commission's decisive powers, too.
The democracy shield risks becoming a hodgepodge of timid half measures. Europe's national capitals must demand immediate action both from the commission and from Ireland. Trump cannot be allowed to hold the hidden levers of Europe's internal political debate. Europeans must have the freedom to communicate with one another without foreign censorship and interference. This crisis is at least as urgent as rearmament.
Johnny Ryan is director of Enforce, a unit of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties