Elon Musk’s latest attempts at direct political interference illustrate the grave danger that Europe is facing. He has suggested overthrowing the UK government, asking if “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government”. Three days after that, he hosted Germany’s far-right candidate for chancellor in forthcoming federal elections in a livestream discussion on the social media platform X, which he owns. It is likely that his rigging of X’s algorithm helped push both into millions of people’s feeds. It also emerged last week that Musk’s SpaceX may start providing a major part of Italy’s defence network.

Europe’s leaders should view this conduct as a sign of things to come. We foolishly allowed control of digital media and infrastructure to concentrate in the hands of a few US tech oligarchs. Now US big tech is Donald Trump’s tool.

Jeff Bezos has neutered the Washington Post, Mark Zuckerberg has gutted Meta’s content moderation, and Google will probably be next. Every US tech oligarch (Bezos, Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Sam Altman, Tim Cook and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella) gave Trump donations of $1m last week.

Trump has Europe in his sights and big tech is now under his wing. Zuckerberg told the Joe Rogan podcast on Friday that he believes the Trump administration will defend US big tech against the EU. Vance’s threat in November that the US would financially starve Nato if the EU enforced its law against X is instructive.

It means that Europe is under pincer attack from both west and east. In the past four months, Russia has nearly succeeded in rigging elections in EU member state Romania and EU candidate Moldova by using TikTok and Meta. Now, it appears that Musk may buy the US arm of TikTok too.

This is a crisis. Liberal democracy will be picked apart unless Ursula von der Leyen and the EU security chief, Henna Virkkunen, take swift, smart action. US and Chinese tech oligarchs control the algorithms that shape how Europeans see the world every day through our social feeds. Their systems amplify outrage and turn our communities against each other. They also push self-harm and suicide into children’s feeds.

What should Europe do? The EU must break big tech’s manipulation machine. Zuckerberg’s anouncement last week about getting rid of Meta factcheckers was a red herring. Meta has known for years that no amount of content moderation can solve the problem created by its own algorithm. Its leaked internal research is clear: “We are never going to remove everything harmful from a communications medium used by so many, but we can at least do the best we can to stop magnifying harmful content by giving it unnatural distribution.”

A secret Facebook study reported in 2016 that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools … our recommendation systems grow the problem”. Yet, last week Zuckerberg barely mentioned algorithms except to say that from now on Meta’s will boost political content even more.

Von der Leyen and Virkkunen should do three things urgently to protect democracy. First, radically speed up action under the Digital Services Act against algorithms that derail political debate.

Second, apply serious political pressure on Ireland to get it to enforce the EU’s data protection law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), against big tech. This is essential because big tech’s algorithms rely on particularly intimate personal data about our tastes and triggers to decide what content to feed us. This in turn keeps us avidly scrolling so that more ads can be sold for our attention. The GDPR prohibits the processing of intimate data that might reveal such things as our political views, beliefs and sexual desires unless we have specifically been asked to switch the system on, warned about the consequences and then separately asked to confirm this is really what we want to do. The tech platforms do not do this.

Enforcing these rules would switch big tech’s algorithms off at a stroke, restoring X and other platforms to their pre-2014 golden age, before the algorithm. People, rather than big tech’s algorithms, would again decide what they say, see and share with their friends.

But a quirk of European law means that Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) has a unique position in leading GDPR investigation and action against big tech data misuse for all of Europe. It is the lead GDPR authority for YouTube and Google, Meta, TikTok, Microsoft and Apple because they have their European headquarters in Ireland.

This has paralysed EU enforcement against big tech, whose data chicanery has gone largely unchallenged by Ireland’s DPC. What limited enforcement it does deliver is generally done under duress from other EU supervisory authorities. Bizarrely, when Europe’s other national data authorities collectively voted that the DPC must investigate how Meta uses people’s most intimate data, it responded not by investigating Meta but by suing them. The European court has yet to rule in the case.

Surprisingly, Ireland has suffered little pressure from Brussels to take its foot off the brakes. Instead, petty enforcement and misapplication of the GDPR has terrorised Europe’s small businesses and spammed everybody with consent popups.

Third, national authorities across Europe should prepare themselves to take action against, and possibly even exclude, big tech’s algorithms from their markets (perhaps by way of the audiovisual media services directive (AVMSD), a largely overlooked EU law regulating audiovisual content) if they resist regulation. Otherwise, countries may resort to less targeted responses, such as EU candidate Albania’s current efforts to ban TikTok for one year.

In the longer term, Brussels should scrap remaining regulatory barriers between EU countries that prevent Europe’s tech startups from growing across borders. Europe also requires a digital infrastructure that does not rely on foreign powers.

Our extremely rapid break away from Russian energy proves that Europe can act decisively. Von der Leyen must move quickly and boldly again. Europe’s democracy is under grave hazard. This is not a fight that can be avoided.