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I’ve been on trial half my life. Yesterday, my 18-year legal drama finally came to an end when the Court of Cassation, Italy’s highest court, definitively convicted me of criminal slander. Many people are familiar with my wrongful conviction for Meredith Kercher’s murder, but this lesser charge, arising from statements I signed during my interrogation, is the one that has continued to haunt me. The charge resulted from a lie invented by the police: that I was present when my roommate Meredith was sexually assaulted and murdered at our apartment in Perugia in 2007. Everything that subsequently went wrong in the investigation and prosecution—the tunnel vision, junk science, biased witnesses—flowed from that lie.

The interrogation I was subjected to remains the most terrifying experience of my life—more terrifying than that first crushing guilty verdict and 26-year sentence; more terrifying than prison itself. I was 20 years old, and was questioned for more than 53 hours over a five-day period in a language I was only just learning to speak. The night of Meredith’s murder, I had stayed with Raffaele Sollecito, a young man I’d just started dating. But no matter how many times I said that, the police refused to believe me. I was berated, threatened, lied to, and slapped, and eventually my sanity broke—I began to believe the lies the police were telling me, and I agreed to sign statements placing myself and another innocent man in the house when the crime had occurred. I recanted only a few hours later, but it didn’t matter. I was coerced into signing the statements and then charged with criminal slander for doing so. (The police, who did not record the interrogation as they were supposed to, deny that I was hit or pressured into making these statements.)

This conviction branded me a malicious liar, and cast suspicion over me even after I was acquitted of murder and freed from prison. And it allowed the Italian authorities to scapegoat me for leading the investigation astray, instead of owning up to their failures. Now I have to live with this wrongful conviction for the rest of my life.

In the first few days of the investigation, the police found what appeared to be black hairs on Meredith’s body that they seem to have believed belonged to someone of African descent. A young man who lived in the flat below ours told the police that a Black man known as “the baron” had visited his apartment in the past. With fingerprints and DNA yet to return from the lab, these were their big leads.

But the police were also suspicious of me. Giuliano Mignini, the prosecutor who led the investigation, was convinced that the perpetrator had not broken into our home, as it appeared—a window was shattered, a rock was found inside. On a hunch, Mignini decided that the break-in had been staged, and therefore, that someone with access to our flat was involved in the murder and covering it up. Of Meredith’s three roommates, I stood out as the youngest and most immature. I was also the lone foreigner—the others were Italians working in law offices. One had been out of town, and the other had screamed and wept after seeing the grisly scene in Meredith’s bedroom. I never saw inside the room, nor did I understand much of the rapid-fire Italian being shouted back and forth. It took me longer to comprehend what had actually happened, and I came off as cold and unmoved in comparison.

One of my roommates also asked me to lie—to deny to the police that we smoked marijuana. She said that they would lose their jobs if anyone found out. So I covered for them. But the police found marijuana plants in the apartment below ours—something I was unaware of—and began to wonder if I was keeping more from them.

When the police interrogate you, the first thing they do is isolate you. Isolation is not just about the room you’re in (one with no windows and no clocks). It’s about making you feel that the police themselves are your only support system. This was easy for the Perugia police; I was in a foreign country thousands of miles from my family, and I often didn’t understand what was being asked of me. I assumed that the police’s unwillingness to believe me was the fault of my own inadequate Italian. The police had also tapped my phone, and knew that my mother was flying to Italy to help me, and that soon I’d no longer be alone. And so, hours before her arrival, they broke me in that final interrogation.

They had discovered a text message on my phone that I’d written to my friend Patrick Lumumba the day of Meredith’s murder. I had been working for Patrick part-time as a hostess at his pub, Le Chic. He’d given me the night off, and I’d replied: “Certo. Ci vediamo più tardi, buona serata.” This was my attempt at translating the English idiom see you later, but to the Italian police, it read as if I’d made a literal appointment to meet Patrick later that night. Bingo.

Patrick was a Congolese immigrant. Here was their African—the source, they assumed, of those hairs. The police were convinced that I’d invited Patrick over, that he had assaulted and murdered Meredith, and that I’d staged a break-in to cover for him.

The interrogation became a relentless pursuit of a confession. I now know that the tactics the police used on me were a version of the Reid Technique, the most widely used interrogation tactic in the world. Police-reform advocates argue that the approach increases the stress associated with denial, while reducing the stress associated with confession. The problem is that it works against the guilty and innocent alike, and studies have shown that police are no better than a coin flip at predicting whether a suspect is lying—though they are, unfortunately, confident in their judgments. (The Reid company denies that the technique increases the risk of false confessions, which they say happen when investigators don’t follow its guidelines.)

They began by contradicting me relentlessly. Countless times, I denied meeting Patrick or knowing anything about the murder. But they would not hear it. They nitpicked every detail of my testimony about my night at Raffaele’s—Did you have dinner at 9:30 or at 10? Did you have sex before or after, and how long did it last? With a guilty suspect, this technique is effective at poking holes in their lies. But with me, an innocent suspect, it degraded my trust in my memories.

Then they lied to me: We have hard evidence placing you at the scene of the crime that night. We know you were there. Like many people, I had assumed that the police were bound by some code of ethics to tell the truth. I could not fathom that they would, or even could, lie to me.

All of this—compounded by the bullying, exhaustion, promises, and threats—reshaped my sense of reality, and made it hard to know what was true and what wasn’t. It was here that my interrogators suggested a reason I couldn’t remember being present when the crime had occurred: I must have witnessed something so traumatic that I’d blocked it out.

This was a minimizing tactic to position me as a witness, not a suspect. And after hours of being accused of lying, it was almost a relief to think that I really was suffering from trauma-induced amnesia. But I still couldn’t remember anything other than spending the night at Raffaele’s. So the police led me to add more details: We know you met with Patrick that night. Where did you meet him? Was Meredith home when you let him inside? I tried my best to imagine what they demanded I remember. I strung together fragments of real memories—Patrick’s brown jacket, a basketball court on the way to my house, our kitchen. But even as I was threatened with 30 years in prison if I didn’t give them the answers they wanted, I still couldn’t imagine anything to do with the murder itself.

This culminated with an officer named Rita Ficarra slapping me on the back of the head, shouting, “Remember! Remember!” until my sanity gave way completely, and I blurted out, “It was Patrick!”—surprising even myself. I was so traumatized, I truly believed that I was on the cusp of recovering some lost memory.

The police high-fived and cheered, then typed up my ramblings. At 1:45 a.m., I signed the statement. Then they rushed off to arrest Patrick. My mom had arrived in Italy and she was calling my phone, but the police wouldn’t let me answer it. They said it was evidence now. A few hours later, Mignini, the prosecutor, arrived to take another statement to try to fill the gaping holes in the first one. I made inferences based on his suggestions.

Did you hear her scream?

I don’t know.

We know you were there. How could you not have heard her scream?

I guess I must have heard her scream.

The police typed it up. Compliant and disoriented, I signed that statement, too, at 5:45 a.m. Only then was I allowed to rest. I curled up on two plastic chairs and fell asleep.

When I woke a few hours later, the “memories” I’d been pressured into imagining didn’t feel real. I told the police that I couldn’t bear witness against Patrick. They ignored me. One reassured me, Your memories will return in time. I demanded a pen and paper and wrote a recantation, explaining that I had been confused and pressured into implicating Patrick. I wrote, “Is the evidence proving my pressance [sic] at the time and place of the crime reliable? If so, what does this say about my memory? Is it reliable?” and “Who is the REAL murder [sic]?”

I handed this recantation—what would become known as my memoriale—to the police. They handcuffed me and led me to Capanne prison. Even then, I still believed them when they said I was merely a witness. It wasn’t until days later, when I was officially charged with murder, that I understood I was a suspect.

Knox in 2007. Courtesy of Amanda Knox

Patrick, thank God, had a rock-solid alibi. But despite his alibi and my recantation, the police still refused to release him. They kept him in custody even after the forensic evidence came back showing that the hairs they’d recovered weren’t human; they were likely coarse wool fibers. Among the many samples and evidentiary items collected from Meredith’s room, there was not a single trace of Patrick—or of me.

Instead, the evidence started to point to a local burglar named Rudy Guede, whose nickname was “the baron.” The murderer had left behind, traced in Meredith’s blood, fingerprints, a bare footprint, and multiple shoeprints. Just a week before the murder, Guede had been arrested in Milan after breaking into a nursery school, where he was found with a large knife. After the murder, he fled to Germany. Soon, the police released Guede’s name and photo to the media and issued an arrest warrant. In a Skype call with a friend, secretly observed by the police, he said that he’d been with Meredith at the house that night, and that I was not there, as the media were reporting. He made no mention of Patrick.     

Once Guede was apprehended, Patrick was released. The media paid little attention as one Black man was traded for another. (The police kept Le Chic closed for months, and Patrick ended up losing the business.) Instead, the media focused on me—“Foxy Knoxy,” the allegedly drug-addled girl next door gone wild who’d orchestrated what they were now describing as a death orgy with Guede and Raffaele. Guede was charged and convicted of sexual assault and murder “with others” in a fast-track trial; Raffaele and I were charged and convicted of the sexual assault and murder a year later. (Guede has maintained that he is innocent, and continues to insist that Raffaele and I carried out his crime.)

The lie that I was at the house when the crime occurred led to repeated instances of what is called forensic confirmation bias. The lie colored the collection and analysis of all the other evidence. It led police to ignore exonerating evidence, such as my lack of a motive or any history of violence or mental illness, my alibi, and the virtual impossibility of participating in such a brutal murder without leaving a single trace of DNA in the room. And it led them to distort and magnify the significance of trivial evidence, such as the fact that my DNA had been found in the bathroom where Guede attempted to clean off Meredith’s blood. Of course my DNA was found there—that was my bathroom too.

This phenomenon has been demonstrated by the cognitive neuroscientist Itiel Dror. In a 2006 study, he gave six fingerprint experts pairs of prints that, unbeknownst to them, they had previously judged in their own casework as matching or not. The experts were given some made-up context for each pair of prints. For the nonmatches, they were told that the suspect had confessed to the crime; for the matches, they were told that the suspect had an ironclad alibi. This fictional information resulted in two-thirds of the experts changing some of their original judgments. Believing that a suspect confessed alters the supposed objectivity of scientific experts. Dror went on to show a similar effect in other forensic domains, including DNA analysis and forensic pathology.

The jury, too, was swayed by the lie, though I truly believe that if they could have observed my interrogation, they would have known better. But my interrogation was not recorded, so no one saw the yelling, the slapping, and how I was psychologically manipulated. The irony is that at the time, Italy was more progressive on this issue than the United States: Recording interrogations was mandatory. But the police and prosecution claimed that my interrogation had been merely an “interview”—that I was not a suspect but merely a witness, and thus I was not entitled to a lawyer or a recording.

Italy’s own courts ruled that my interrogation was illegal and that the statements I’d signed were inadmissible as evidence for the murder charge. But while being tried for murder, I was simultaneously being tried by the same jury for criminal slander, and the judge allowed the statements as evidence for the slander charge. So the jurors were instructed to ignore the statements for the first charge, but scrutinize them closely for the second. It’s absurd to think that one didn’t affect the other. Had I not been charged with slander, I may never have been wrongly convicted of murder.

After four years in prison, Raffaele and I were acquitted of murder in 2011, when the court-appointed DNA experts found that the minuscule traces supposedly linking us to the crime were unreliable, and possibly the result of lab contamination. But our acquittal was appealed by the prosecution, and we were reconvicted of the same crime in 2014, based largely on spurious character evidence. Finally, in 2015, we were definitively acquitted by the Court of Cassation. In all of those trials, my slander conviction was upheld, with a sentence of three years—time served. And in that 2015 ruling, the high court also affirmed the police’s initial lie. Many who still believed in my guilt pointed to this “judicial fact” to support their theories: Amanda Knox is a liar, and she was there that night. Even if she is innocent, she knows more than she’s telling.

This left me free, but wrongly convicted; it let Guede avoid taking full responsibility for his crimes; and it left the Kercher family with a needless cloud of uncertainty.     

I have been trying to appeal the slander conviction ever since. In 2019, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in my favor, sanctioning Italy for failing to provide me with a lawyer during the interrogation. Then, with the help of the Italy Innocence Project, I appealed to the Court of Cassation to reopen the case, and in 2023, it overturned my slander conviction and sent the case back to the appellate level for retrial. The high court limited this new trial to examining a single piece of evidence. The statements I’d been pressured into signing were no longer admissible. All that the judges and jury could consider was the handwritten recantation, my memoriale, in which I’d written things like “I’m unsure about the truth,” and “I don’t feel I can be used as condemming [sic] testimone [sic].”  

I traveled back to Italy for the hearing in June 2024, and testified once more. The judges and jury deliberated for two hours, then came back and found me guilty. I was dumbfounded, and deeply depressed. The conviction legally required two things to be true: that I’d made a false accusation, and that I’d done so knowingly. As for the false accusation, the presiding judge pointed to this line in my memoriale: “I stand by my statements that I made last night about events that could have taken place in my home with Patrik [sic].” I wrote this to affirm to the police, after being repeatedly accused of lying, that I was genuinely confused. I finished that sentence with “but I want to make very clear that these events seem more unreal to me than what I said before, that I stayed at Raffaele’s house.”

As for the second requirement, the court cited my memoriale when I wrote, “I saw myself cowering in the kitchen with my hands over my ears because in my head I could hear Meredith screaming. But I’ve said this many times so as to make myself clear: these things seem unreal to me, like a dream.” Despite the obvious confusion of my statements, the court argued that this mention of a scream was irrefutable evidence of my presence at the house, and proved that I knew who was and wasn’t there. In short, the court ruled that my memoriale was both false and slanderous and accurate and reliable.

I appealed this ruling to the Court of Cassation in one last bid to clear my name. And here we are.

In Italy, there is a notion of bella figura—of putting on a good face. An old-world sanctity persists around reputations, defamation and slander are taken very seriously, and officials are terrified of looking bad—everyone’s egos are at stake. An Italian lawyer once explained my slander conviction to me as a contentina, a “small contentment” handed down by the Court of Cassation to the lower courts and prosecutors. It was incredibly embarrassing for all involved when the high court absolved me of murder and cited “sensational failures” in the investigation and “culpable omissions” in the prosecution. So the high court upheld the slander conviction as a consolation prize for the officials they were rebuking. This absolved them of responsibility for justice going awry, because they could blame me, the liar, for derailing the investigation.

I’m crushed that Italy has cemented this lie into the legal record, and that I have no further recourse to clear my name in that country.

I am not a liar or a slanderer. But in the midst of all this, there is someone who committed slander, though he has never been charged with it. Rudy Guede falsely accused me and Raffaele of his crime after his arrest; in one interview from prison, he said that he was “101 percent” certain I was there the night of the murder. He is free again, after serving just 13 years in prison, and is being charged and investigated for sexual and physical abuse of another young woman. (He denies the allegations.) He continues to smear Raffaele and me. After his release, he said in an interview, “The documents say others were there and that I did not inflict the fatal wounds.”

Guede’s lies—and his relatively short sentence and release—are derivative of the lie invented by the police that evidence placed me at the scene of the crime. For a long time, I blamed myself for succumbing to the pressure to believe that lie. But what happened to me is not unusual.

My first glimmer of understanding came in prison, when I received a letter from Saul Kassin, a psychologist and an expert in false confessions. What had happened to me fit a playbook that had been used against hundreds—perhaps thousands—of other innocent people. The isolation, the bullying, the nitpicking of my memories, the excessive hours under interrogation, the refusal of food and bathroom breaks (I was even on my period and bleeding through my pants), the minimization, and the deception—they were all by the book. A tremendous sense of relief washed over me in realizing that what had happened was not my fault, and I came to find fellowship with others who had been put through coercive interrogations.

“Can you imagine,” Kassin told me recently, when I interviewed him for a podcast series I produced called False Confessions, “in the Central Park Five case, if each one of the five was charged with slander for implicating the others?” They, too, were lied to about the evidence against them. And like me, they all believed that they were merely witnesses, and that they would be released after signing their confessions.

But the case I see as most parallel to my own is that of Marty Tankleff, who was accused of killing his parents in Long Island in 1988. He was told that his father had awoken from a coma to say that his son was responsible. Tankleff could not comprehend how his father would lie about something like that, and after the police offered him the suggestion of a traumatic blackout, he came to believe that he’d been involved—just long enough for the police to obtain his confession. It sent him to prison for 17 years, until he was exonerated.

The problem with police deception is not that it breaks your will—isolation, bullying, and exhaustion do that—it’s that it loosens your grip on reality. This is why advocates in the U.S. are now pushing to ban deception by police during interrogations, something that has long been illegal in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Australia, and elsewhere.

In the past few years, laws have been passed in various states in the U.S. to prohibit the police from lying to suspects during custodial interrogations, but they are all limited to minors. Adults, too, are vulnerable to these same pressures. At 20, I was in so many ways still a naive child. When I testified before the Washington State legislature last year in support of a bill that would ban the use of any testimony gathered through police deception, regardless of the suspect’s age, I was shocked to hear a law-enforcement representative frankly admit that police need to lie to do their job. The bill ended up being gutted; next week, I will testify in support of a new version of it.

When police tell the truth, they’re not only being more ethical—they’re also being more effective. A rapport-based interview method called PEACE has been embraced by the U.K., Canada, and several other countries. It eschews deception in favor of open-ended questions, and has been found to yield better information than guilt-presumptive techniques. And it has the added benefit of not destroying the trust between the police and the communities they are supposed to protect and serve.

Today, I’m going to allow myself to grieve this final ruling in my own case. But tomorrow I’m going to pick myself up and continue advocating for changing the law going forward. I’ve emerged from this legal saga with a deep understanding of how lies can derail the course of justice. When the police lie about evidence to suspects, they usually do so with noble intentions. They aren’t trying to elicit false confessions, but those lies can send the innocent to prison, let the guilty go free, and deprive victims of the closure they deserve.   

During an American election, a rich man can hand out $1 million checks to prospective voters. Companies and people can use secretly funded “dark money” nonprofits to donate unlimited money, anonymously, to super PACs, which can then spend it on advertising campaigns. Pod­casters, partisans, or anyone, really, can tell outrageous, incendiary lies about a candidate. They can boost those falsehoods through targeted online advertising. No special courts or election rules can stop the disinformation from spreading before voters see it. The court of public opinion, which over the past decade has seen and heard everything, no longer cares. U.S. elections are now a political Las Vegas: Anything goes.

But that’s not the way elections are run in other countries. In Britain, political parties are, at least during the run-up to an election, limited to spending no more than £54,010 per candidate. In Germany, as in many other European countries, the state funds political parties, proportionate to their number of elected parliamentarians, so that politicians do not have to depend on, and become corrupted by, wealthy donors. In Poland, courts fast-track election-­related libel cases in the weeks before a vote in order to discourage people from lying.

Nor is this unique to Europe. Many democracies have state or public media that are obligated, at least in principle, to give equal time to all sides. Many require political donations to be transparent, with the names of donors listed in an online registry. Many have limits on political advertising. Some countries also have rules about hate speech and indict people who break them.

Countries apply these laws to create conditions for fair debate, to build trust in the system, and to inspire confidence in the winning candidates. Some democracies believe that transparency matters—­that voters should know who is funding their candidates, as well as who is paying for political messages on social media or anywhere else. In some places, these rules have a loftier goal: to prevent the rise of anti­democratic extremism of the kind that has engulfed democracies—­and especially European democracies—­­in the past.

But for how much longer can democracies pursue these goals? We live in a world in which algorithms controlled by American and Chinese oligarchs choose the messages and images seen by millions of people; in which money can move through secret bank accounts with the help of crypto schemes; and in which this dark money can then boost anonymous social-media accounts with the aim of shaping public opinion. In such a world, how can any election rules be enforced? If you are Albania, or even the United Kingdom, do you still get to set the parameters of your public debate? Or are you now forced to be Las Vegas too?

Although it’s easy to get distracted by the schoolyard nicknames and irresponsible pedophilia accusations that Elon Musk flings around, these are the real questions posed by his open, aggressive use of X to spread false information and promote extremist and anti-European politicians in the U.K., Germany, and elsewhere. The integrity of elections—­and the possibility of debate untainted by misinformation injected from abroad—is equally challenged by TikTok, the Chinese platform, and by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, whose subsidiaries include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. TikTok says the company does not accept any paid political advertising. Meta, which announced in January that it is abandoning fact-checking on its sites in the U.S., also says it will continue to comply with European laws. But even before Zucker­berg’s radical policy change, these promises were empty. Meta’s vaunted content curation and moderation have never been transparent. Nobody knew, and nobody knows, what exactly Facebook’s algorithm was promoting and why. Even an occasional user of these platforms encounters spammers, scammers, and opaque accounts running foreign influence operations. No guide to the algorithm, and no real choices about it, are available on Meta products, X, or TikTok.

In truth, no one knows if any platforms really comply with political-funding rules either, because nobody outside the companies can fully monitor what happens online during an intense election campaign—and after the voting has ended, it’s too late. According to declassified Romanian-intelligence documents, someone allegedly spent more than $1 million on TikTok content in the 18 months before an election in support of a Romanian presidential candidate who declared that he himself had spent nothing at all. In a belated attempt to address this and other alleged discrepancies, a Romanian court canceled the first round of that election, a decision that itself damaged Romanian democracy.

Not all of this is new. Surreptitious political-party funding was a feature of the Cold War, and the Russian government has continued this practice, sometimes by offering deals to foreign business­people close to pro-Russian politicians. Press moguls with international political ambitions are hardly a novelty. Rupert Murdoch, an Australian who has U.S. citizenship, has long played an outsize role in U.K. politics through his media companies. John Major, the former British prime minister and Conservative Party leader, has said that in 1997, Murdoch threatened to pull his newspapers’ support unless the prime minister pursued a more anti-­European policy. Major refused. Murdoch has said, “I have never asked a prime minister for anything,” but one of his Conservative-­leaning tabloids, The Sun, did endorse the Labour Party in the next election. Major lost.

That incident now seems almost quaint. Even at the height of its influence, the print edition of The Sun sold 4 million copies a day. More to the point, it operated, and still does, within the constraints of U.K. rules and regulations, as do all broadcast and print media. Murdoch’s newspapers take British libel and hate-speech laws into consideration when they run stories. His business strategy is necessarily shaped by rules limiting what a single company can own. After his journalists were accused of hacking phones and bribing police in the early 2000s, Murdoch himself had to testify before an investigative commission, and he closed down one of his tabloids for good.

[McKay Coppins: Europe braces for Trump]

Social media not only has far greater reach—Musk’s personal X account has more than 212 million followers, giving him enormous power to set the news agenda around the world—it also exists outside the legal system. Under the American law known as Section 230, passed nearly three decades ago, internet platforms are not treated as publishers in the U.S. In practice, neither Facebook nor X has the same legal responsibility for what appears on their platforms as do, say, The Wall Street Journal and CNN. And this, too, has consequences: Americans have created the information climate that other countries must accept, and this allows deceptive election practices to thrive. If countries don’t have their own laws, and until recently most did not, Section 230 effectively requires them to treat social-media companies as if they exist outside their legal systems too.

Brazil broke with this pattern last year, when a judge demanded that Musk comply with Brazilian laws against spreading misinformation and political extremism, and forced X offline until he did. Several European countries, including the U.K., Germany, and France, have also passed laws designed to bring the platforms into compliance with their own legal systems, mandating fines for companies that violate hate-speech laws or host other illegal content. But these laws are controversial and hard to enforce. Besides, “illegal speech” is not necessarily the central problem. No laws prevented Musk from interviewing Alice Weidel, a leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, on X, thereby providing her with a huge platform, available to no other political candidate, in the month before a national election. The interview, which included several glaringly false statements (among others, that Weidel was the “leading” candidate), was viewed 45 million times in 24 hours, a number far beyond the reach of any German public or private media.

Only one institution on the planet is large enough and powerful enough to write and enforce laws that could make the tech companies change their policies. Partly for that reason, the European Union may soon become one of the Trump administration’s most prominent targets. In theory, the EU’s Digital Services Act, which took full effect last year, can be used to regulate, fine, and, in extreme circumstances, ban internet companies whose practices clash with European laws. Yet a primary intent of the act is not punitive, but rather to open up the platforms: to allow vetted researchers access to platform data, and to give citizens more transparency about what they hear and see. Freedom of speech also means the right to receive information, and at the moment social-media companies operate behind a curtain. We don’t know if they are promoting or suppressing certain points of view, curbing or encouraging orchestrated political campaigns, discouraging or provoking violent riots. Above all, we don’t know who is paying for misinformation to be spread online.

In the past, the EU has not hesitated to try to apply European law to tech companies. Over the past decade, for example, Google has faced three fines totaling more than $8 billion for breaking antitrust law (though one of these fines was overturned by the EU’s General Court in 2024).

In November, the European Commission fined Meta more than $800 million for unfair trade practices. But for how much longer will the EU have this authority? In the fall, J. D. Vance issued an extraordinarily unsubtle threat, one that is frequently repeated in Europe. “If NATO wants us to continue supporting them and NATO wants us to continue to be a good participant in this military alliance,” Vance told an interviewer, “why don’t you respect American values and respect free speech?” Mark Zuckerberg, echoing Vance’s misuse of the expression free speech to mean “freedom to conceal company practices from the public,” put it even more crudely. In a conversation with Joe Rogan in January, Zuckerberg said he feels “optimistic” that President Donald Trump will intervene to stop the EU from enforcing its own antitrust laws: “I think he just wants America to win.”

Does America “winning” mean that European democracies, and maybe other democracies, lose? Some European politicians think it might. Robert Habeck, the German vice chancellor and a leader of that country’s Green Party, believes that Musk’s frenzies of political activity on X aren’t the random blurts of an addled mind, but rather are “logical and systematic.” In his New Year’s address, Habeck said that Musk is deliberately “strengthening those who are weakening Europe,” including the explicitly anti-European AfD. This, he believes, is because “a weak Europe is in the interest of those for whom regulation is an inappropriate limitation of their power.”

Until recently, Russia was the most important state seeking to undermine European institutions. Vladimir Putin has long disliked the EU because it restricts Russian companies’ ability to intimidate and bribe European political leaders and companies, and because the EU is larger and more powerful than Russia, whereas European countries on their own are not. Now a group of American oligarchs also want to undermine European institutions, because they don’t want to be regulated—and they may have the American president on their side. Quite soon, the European Union, along with Great Britain and other democracies around the world, might find that they have to choose between their alliance with the United States and their ability to run their own elections and select their own leaders without the pressure of aggressive outside manipulation. Ironically, countries, such as Brazil, that don’t have the same deep military, economic, and cultural ties to the U.S. may find it easier to maintain the sovereignty of their political systems and the transparency of their information ecosystems than Europeans.

A crunch point is imminent, when the European Commission finally concludes a year-long investigation into X. Tellingly, two people who have advised the commission on this investigation would talk with me only off the record, because the potential for reprisals against them and their organizations—­whether it be online trolling and harassment or lawsuits—­is too great. Still, both advisers said that the commission has the power to protect Europe’s sovereignty, and to force the platforms to be more transparent. “The commission should look at the raft of laws and rules it has available and see how they can be applied,” one of them told me, “always remembering that this is not about taking action against a person’s voice. This is the commission saying that everyone’s voice should be equal.”

At least in theory, no country is obligated to become an electoral Las Vegas, as America has. Global democracies could demand greater transparency around the use of algorithms, both on social media and in the online-advertising market more broadly. They could offer consumers more control over what they see, and more information about what they don’t see. They could enforce their own campaign-funding laws. These changes could make the internet more open and fair, and therefore a better, safer place for the exercise of free speech. If the chances of success seem narrow, it’s not because of the lack of a viable legal framework—­rather it’s because, at the moment, cowardice is as viral as one of Musk’s tweets.

This article appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “Can Europe Stop Elon Musk?”