Can a country build its own social media?

When I built my first website back in 1998, the internet felt expansive.

- Sebastian Vogelsang

You could publish something in Berlin, and someone in Boston or Belgrade might stumble on it within seconds. But today, as a small number of tech monopolies hoover up attention and strangle innovation, that spirit of connection has been lost.

Through their powerful platforms, social-media giants control a large share of the digital world's underlying architecture. Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram), X, and others operate as walled gardens, and their algorithms discourage users from leaving by deprioritising posts with outgoing links. People end up stuck on one platform, scrolling mindlessly — an outcome diametrically opposed to the early vision of the internet as a web of interlinked sites and communities.

Europe should recognise this for what it is: a systemic dependency that threatens the continent's digital sovereignty. Just as the European Union seeks to reduce its reliance on external providers for semiconductors, cloud computing, and AI, it must do the same for social media. The dominant platforms extract value from European users by capturing their attention and selling their data, while paying little in taxes and skirting regulations. Their proprietary infrastructure increasingly shapes our lives, from the news we see to the way we speak online.