This is the keynote speech delivered during the Conference on Media Freedom in Vienna organised by the Malta chair of the OSCE.

Thank you so much for having me here. And to Malta for chairing and organising this summit. You are a country that knows first-hand how vital press freedom is and how devastating it is when it comes under attack. 

It's a great honour to be here with Matthew Caruana Galizia, a journalist who has been doing vital work on the issue of weaponised lawsuits. The story of his mother, Daphne Caruana Galizia, is Matthew’s to share. And it is critical to hear for us to understand what is at stake here. 

Because killing journalists is what happens when every other attempt to silence them has failed. And these are deadly times.

In Ukraine, at least 11 journalists have been killed, in Gaza, 137. 

And every time a journalist dies, a tiny fragment of truth dies. 

We are living in a world in which there is a war on truth. And what I think is coming is a war on journalists. I want to talk about America. Because what happens in America is going to affect us all in Europe too: our freedom, our security. Because America stands on the cusp of a new era of repression. Of a type I don’t think the world has seen before. 

Donald Trump has called the press ‘the enemy of the people’. Here, in Europe, that is a familiar phrase. We have heard it before. We know where it leads.  

Marty Barron, the legendary former executive editor of the Washington Post, speaking on national public radio this week, reeled off a terrifying list of possible weapons that Trump may use to target journalists and news organisations.

I’m going to read that list. It's long but it includes: Prosecuting and imprisoning journalists for leaks of national security information. Trump has spoken at his rallies about journalists ‘meeting their bride’ in prison - that is a reference to being raped. And he has said that to cheers.

Trump has spoken at his rallies about journalists ‘meeting their bride’ in prison - that is a reference to being raped

He is likely to increase the classification of documents, scale back freedom of information laws, put pressure on the owners of newspapers, encourage allies to bring libel suits, to challenge the key Supreme Court decision - New York Times versus Sullivan - that protects news organisations from libel suits.

He is likely to put pressure on advertisers, expand his power over tech platforms, to deny funding to public radio. And turn the Voice of America into a propaganda outlet. 

This is going to create waves across the world. It will give permission for other leaders to do the same. Trump is borrowing many of these moves from other authoritarian leaders. And what we are going to see is an accelerated feedback loop. 

A new age of politically motivated witchhunts 

The US is entering a new age of politically motivated witchhunts that will look like McCarthyism on steroids. Because we are entering a whole new era of state power. 

The alliance of Trump and Elon Musk is an alliance of a type the world has never seen before. It’s the blending and merging of state power with a global communication platform. This is the kind of propaganda machine that Joseph Goebbels couldn’t even dream of.

And, again, this is going to affect us here in Europe too: Our elections. Our security. This week Elon Musk has been threatening British parliamentarians. 

His platform is a weapon. It’s a weapon that can be turned onto our elections at any time. Just as Musk did in America. And it can also be turned on any individual or organisation that Musk decides he doesn’t like.

And the consequences of that, allied to state power, are terrifying. This is a new kind of darkness facing the world. And to explain how that will impact individual journalists, I want briefly tell you some of my story here. Which is a nothingburger compared to what is to come. But it is a warning.

I was sued for defamation in the British high court by the subject of my investigation into a small data company called Cambridge Analytica. 

That became a huge story, Facebook received multibillion-dollar fines for allowing Cambridge Analytica to illegally obtain 87 million people’s Facebook data. And it showed us, I think maybe for the first time, how these Silicon Valley companies operate with total impunity. How both journalism and Congress were unable to hold Mark Zuckerberg to account. 

And the individual who sued me over that investigation did something very clever. The biggest political donor in UK history didn’t sue The Guardian. Instead, he came after me as an individual. He waited for me to repeat a line from a Guardian article in a talk, and he sued me for that. It was clever and deliberate and designed to silence and intimidate me. To isolate me from my news organisation. And to silence and intimidate all journalism into him. And it worked.  

And this, I have no doubt, is a playbook that will be deployed against other journalists.  It wasn’t just that the lawsuit tied me up for years in litigation and led to years of stress and fear, it also became a central weapon in an online harassment and abuse campaign against me.

Hybrid warfare

Every court report led to a new wave of attacks. It was like being trapped in a washing machine, a spin cycle of abuse.  This is a playbook. Journalists are not just facing litigation and lawsuits. It’s that plus online abuse, doxxing, threats, online mobs. And what we see is that these two things enable and amplify each other. And it’s a weapon that we’ve seen overwhelmingly directed at women journalists. It’s what happened to Maria Ressa, the Nobel Prize-winning journalist in the Philippines, and Rana Ayyub, an investigative journalist in India. It’s what happened to Daphne. 

And I want you to understand what this is: it’s hybrid warfare. It’s across both the real world and the online world. Which by the way are the same thing. It’s hybrid warfare being waged against journalists. And think what that is going to mean when Elon Musk has his hands on the control of the global propaganda machine.

Rana Ayyub rang me this week to tell me how the abuse against her had rapidly ramped up since Trump won the election in the US. It’s already empowered and emboldened Modi and his supporters. Rana had been tailed on a reporting trip by state intelligence officers. Her mobile phone number was shared online then, she’d become the victim of a deepfake porn video. She was scared, freaked out.

A reckless decision in haste

And this, believe me, will happen to other journalists. I want to finish talking briefly about my own news organisation, which is itself under grave threat.  All of mine and my colleagues' work is read by a global audience on the Guardian’s website. But in the UK, it also appears in the print edition of the Observer, the Guardian’s Sunday sister newspaper.

And, as we speak, the Guardian’s board has approved the sale of the Observer – the oldest Sunday newspaper in the world – to a tiny, financially unprofitable podcast company. We, the journalists of both the Guardian and the Observer, believe this is an existential threat to our journalism. 

We believe the company that is seeking to buy us has no track record of success, no business model, and insufficient funds. We don’t understand why no alternatives have been considered. We believe that the Guardian is risking the trust of the readers by making such a reckless decision in haste. We believe it is the beginning of the end of our newspaper.  

Now, 93% of us have now voted to go on strike. I’m telling you this because ownership matters. The British government has previously scrutinised the potential buyers of news organisations and I urge it do so in this case. 

Because the freedom of the press is precious and fragile and when a news organisation dies, it leaves a gaping hole. Politicians go unscrutinised, crimes go unreported, human rights abuses go undocumented. If press freedom means anything, it has to mean the ability to speak out to advocate for the survival of our own news organisation. Because if a newspaper is allowed to die, it’s never coming back.

And at this point, we, the journalists of the Guardian and Observer, believe the Guardian’s management is an active threat to press freedom. 

I'm speaking on behalf of those journalists when I say that we believe its actions are imperilling the survival of a 240-year-old newspaper. 

I’ve learned the hard way what happens when journalism comes under attack. I am lucky. I live in a country with strong institutions and rule of law. I faced a civil not a criminal suit. And it still felt like an existential struggle for survival. I’m only now two years on, recovering my psychological and physical health. And I’m ending by telling you this because there is a global witch hunt coming. And what happened to me must not be allowed to happen to other journalists.

I am just one person. But what I worry is that news organisations will find reasons to not provide financial and other support to their journalists when they come under attack. They will be afraid of the consequences. They will find loopholes and excuses to not do the right thing. 

This is what happened to me. I faced my nightmare alone. But we cannot let that happen to other journalists. Because a threat to one journalist is a threat to all. A threat to one news organisation is a threat to all. 

There is a curtain of darkness that is falling across the world, a blanket of fake news and lies is smothering the truth and we know where that leads. We simply cannot afford to let this happen. 

Carole Jane Cadwalladr is a British author and investigative journalist. She rose to international prominence in 2018 for her role in exposing the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, for which she was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize.

Carole Cadwalladr addressing the OSCE meeting on Friday.