What Social Media Could Do for Europe (Without Making Everyone Speak English)

Europe has spent decades building a common market, aligning legal frameworks, and hammering out a massive shared political project. Yet, for all this institutional scaffolding, one essential ingredient is still missing: a genuine, shared public conversation.

In political science, this is known as the "European public sphere", a hypothetical space where citizens from different countries debate the same issues, challenge each other, and form opinions that cross national borders. In reality, this space exists only in fragments.

The roadblock is as obvious as it is stubborn: we simply don’t share a language.

There is no European equivalent of a nightly news broadcast watched from Lisbon to Helsinki, nor a single morning newspaper read across the continent. Instead, most discussions remain fiercely guarded within national and linguistic borders. While English has certainly stepped up as a practical lingua franca for business, science, and elite politics, relying on it as our sole bridge carries a hidden cultural cost.

The Hidden Tax of a Second Language

Europe is home to roughly 250 native languages, with 24 used as official languages of the EU. A language isn't just a collection of interchangeable words; it shapes how we argue, joke, persuade, and conceptualize the world. Every dialect carries centuries of unique cultural baggage and assumptions.

When we force ourselves to communicate entirely in English as a second or third language, we inevitably flatten our own perspectives. We use a narrower vocabulary, dodge complex ideas because they’re too exhausting to articulate, and leave nuance on the cutting room floor long before hitting "post."

The result isn’t just clunky communication, it's a quiet form of self-censorship. Millions of sharp minds sit out of international debates entirely because expressing sophisticated thoughts in a foreign tongue demands too much friction. Their insights stay locked inside native-language silos, invisible to the rest of the continent.

This is arguably Europe’s greatest wasted resource. Every country has spent decades refining unique approaches to problems we all share, whether it's urban planning, education models, housing policy, or civic institutions. Yet these vital policy conversations rarely cross borders, not because Europeans don't care, but because they literally cannot find each other. We end up running the exact same debates twenty-seven times in parallel across different languages, with too little cross-pollination. The internet promised to erase these borders, but language silently rebuilt them.

Why More English Isn't the Answer

The standard counterargument is simple: "Just wait a generation, everyone will speak English eventually."

But asking 450 million people to think, debate, and create primarily in a foreign language is a massive compromise. It demands that they leave behind the very cultural idiosyncrasies that make their perspectives valuable in the first place. Furthermore, the more dominant English becomes online, the more the internet centralizes around Anglo-centric discourse, actively pushing smaller linguistic communities into the margins.

Europe doesn't need a digital world where everyone abandons their native tongue; it needs an environment where nobody has to.

With recent strides in machine translation, that shift is becoming entirely feasible. Imagine a social network where you can log on, write in your native language, and interact seamlessly with anyone else. A Finnish engineer posts a technical breakdown in Finnish, a Portuguese journalist replies in Portuguese, and a Greek student chimes in using Greek. Everyone reads the thread naturally in their own language. Nobody has to dumb down their thoughts, and nobody is left out of the room.

Technology shouldn't aim to erase Europe's linguistic diversity—it should make it accessible. True translation doesn't iron out cultural differences; it highlights them, which is exactly what makes European collaboration interesting in the first place.

Real-World Proof of Concept

This isn't just wishful thinking. While diving into the Japanese digital space, I noticed how an independent developer is already building tools to tackle this exact kind of "language isolation", the frustrating sense of being locked out of brilliant conversations happening right next to you.

A developer named Riyo Takahashi built SkyPhone Social, a multilingual client tailored for the decentralized AT Protocol ecosystem (the infrastructure behind networks like Bluesky, Eurosky.social or wsocial.eu). The app automatically translates posts into the user’s preferred language inline, allowing people to participate natively without defaulting to English.

Japan is a textbook example of why this matters. For native Japanese speakers, mastering English is notoriously difficult due to the fundamental structural differences between the languages. Yet Japan is packed with world-class engineers, designers, and thinkers whose ideas deserve to be part of the global conversation. Europe faces a similar, if slightly less extreme, version of this hurdle. Plenty of Europeans can order a coffee or write a basic email in English, but far fewer feel comfortable using it to defend a complex political stance or express deep personal nuance.

A Different Flavor of Globalization

The next generation of social media networks needs to stop chasing the myth of a single global language. Instead, the goal should be mutual accessibility.

If we let machine translation do the heavy lifting, Europe might finally develop the democratic public sphere it has lacked for decades, all without sacrificing its cultural identity. The implications of this go way beyond Europe, pointing toward a healthier version of globalization, one built on mutual understanding rather than forced assimilation. The internet always promised to connect humanity; breaking down the final language barrier might actually let us understand each other.