‘How To Save Yourself from Self-Cyborgization’ — My Latest Hot Type Column in Byline

For this week’s Hot Type column in Byline, I turn to a panel of global information warfare experts for tips on how we can best protect ourselves, our minds, and our countries. Here’s an excerpt

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Thank you to each of you who took the time to attend our panel discussion on the ‘universal contamination’ of information warfare. The responses from our global guests were so valuable, I produced a print report for my Hot Type column in Byline Supplement:

How to Save Yourself from 'Self-Cyborgization'

Thank you to everyone who supports the good work we do at Byline Supplement — it means a great deal to those of us on the frontline of independent investigative reporting. If you are not yet a member of Byline, and you would like to read any of my paywalled columns in full, please reach out to me at bettedangerous/gmail.

Below, is an excerpt from this week’s Hot Type column:

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Hot Type: How to Save Yourself from 'Self-Cyborgization'

With the dramatic impacts of global information warfare becoming ever clearer, columnist Heidi Siegmund Cuda investigates how we can best protect ourselves

Maybe if we called it ‘Spy War’ Western audiences wouldn’t have gotten lost in the code.

If we tagged ‘information warfare’ as spycraft, maybe things would have turned out differently in America and other targeted countries whose democracies are now under water.

On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder calls it ‘self-cyborgization’ — arguing with bots or agents in another country, who deploy programmed responses by political technologists designed to depress and demoralize the real people they interact with. Snyder said being in ‘the company of code’ is ‘desperately sad’.

“The ‘us’ becomes nonexistent if the other thing on the side of the screen is a bot,” he said in a Global Empowerment Meeting in 2018. “You think it’s a ‘we’ but you’re alone—you’re in the company of code—it’s not only desperately sad, but it’s politically significant—it probably caused the Brexit vote.”

I’ve argued that targeted disinformation probably caused the 2016 US election presidential outcome, and then… dramatic pause… we did nothing.

In America, Democratic leaders during the last administration had every indication that the espionage was ongoing but refused to address it in any meaningful way. Agents from another country manipulated us by remote.

It was an odd choice not to combat it, considering Donald Trump was operating a shadow government parroting the same unreality featured nightly on Russian State TV.

But it was after reading this one sentence in the Peter Pomerantsev book, This Is Not Propaganda, that it became clear to me that we have to save ourselves.

He wrote: “Is disinformation just the excuse we use to let ourselves off the hook? We didn’t do anything ‘because we were confused by a bot farm’?”

How pathetic of us.

It rang so true and sad that I called up global experts on internet espionage and asked them for help.

If no one is coming to save us, then we have to get smart on our own. With elections coming up in Europe, the stakes to restore access to factual information could not be more dire.

I reached out to geopolitical analysts Joni Askola from Finland and Monique Camarrafrom Italy. I also asked for comments from Disinfolklore’s Stephen Douglas from the UK, and the Disinfo Resilience Network founder Dietmar Pichler from Austria.

What follows is a Q & A with these panelists:

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‘Check Your Bias’

Heidi Siegmund Cuda: Can you please offer your best tips on how people can take responsibility for their newspheres and news hygiene — any suggestions on how to best ensure reality and fact-based narratives.

Monique Camarra: The first thing to do is a self-examination of our own biases very carefully. This will help readers and consumers of information understand what they are prone to accept as ‘truth’ and/or spike their interest for certain kinds of information or discard it outright. Normally, propaganda and information campaigns of any kind are designed by malign actors to create messaging so that it will be accepted as truth or at least plausible, and craft them according to the biases we already hold. The messaging is also littered with emotionally pregnant wording.

Study the history and mechanics of propaganda and information warfare. The messaging malign actors chose to disseminate to grab our attention on social media feeds and media outlets relies on atavistic myths and legends that we recognize: good and evil, heroes and villains, the self-made man, to name a few. If we learn about the disinformation campaigns that past practitioners of propaganda and information warfare have used, what we see today will not come as a surprise, and we will immediately understand there is manipulation afoot.

Nothing is new in propaganda and information warfare when it comes to messaging. What is new is that messages can be crafted to target very specific groups, and they do so very quickly.

Dietmar Pichler: The basics of media literacy, to be able to tell the difference between reliable news outlets and fringe media channels, are definitely not obsolete. But what really concerns me is that we also have to realize that even established media and universities can sometimes host or invite fringe, obscure voices, not just politicians, but also academics, activists, or so-called ‘philosophers’.

We need to learn to analyze who these people are and put them in context: who is the person, what views have they held in the past, what are their affiliations, and are they regularly appearing on Russian state TV?

‘Archetypal Disinfolklore’

Stephen Douglas: The technique I'm working most with at the moment is what I call ‘archetypal disinfolklore’ — any form of data, whether it's on my feed or in a tweet or in a pronouncement by the President of the United States, I'm asking, ‘What is the archetypal identity this person is trying to entrench in my mind’? And so, for instance, this week, Donald was trying to archetype himself as peacemaker.

He attacked Iran in a breach of the US Constitution, a breach of international law. And then, he tries to archetype himself very slyly as peacemaker between Israel and Iran, when, in fact, he is a protagonist in the war and he has brought the United States into a state of war.

Very astute geopolitical analysts are dumbfounded by what Trump is doing, but I believe what he and those behind him are doing is extremely clever. It's precisely what I witnessed the Russians do in eastern Ukraine, where I was working between 2015 and 2018.

Part of my job was to monitor about 180 ceasefires. And so what Russia was doing there was archetyping itself as adhering to ceasefires. And then every morning I was gathering evidence from Russian occupiers and from Ukrainian soldiers about how the so-called ceasefire had been breached. And this is decoupling the idea of ceasefires from meaning.

Donald Trump is decoupling the idea of ceasefire from an actual concrete absence of fire. And what he's really doing inside all of our minds is exactly what the Russians were doing in eastern Ukraine and elsewhere.

I think this is a very conscious strategy that I've seen at work before. And I think we ought to be very wary of it.

Joni Askola: There is no single method to guarantee that the news we consume is entirely fact-based. However, there are several important habits we can adopt to reduce our vulnerability to disinformation.

First, it is crucial to understand that this is an ongoing process — not a one-time fix. While we should avoid falling into paranoia, we must also remain vigilant. Relying on multiple sources is essential, but even trusted outlets should be regularly evaluated. A source might be reliable on some issues and biased or misleading on others.

The key is to stay curious, read widely, question motives, and continuously assess why a source is presenting information the way it is.

Heidi Siegmund Cuda: What are your biggest concerns for Europe or for any specific European country when it comes to information warfare impacts on the future and upcoming elections?

Monique Camarra: My fear is not that malign actors will undermine the electoral process in Italy: what we do see is that red-brown populist parties, such as the Movimento 5 Stelle, and micro-parties, such as Potere al Popolo, seek to advance Russian and Chinese attempts to discredit our institutions and disseminate messages that degrade our collective security within the NATO alliance. This could affect our collective response to European defence and security in the face of increasing Russo-Chinese hybrid campaigns…

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‘Democracies Are Fragile’

Dietmar Pichler: There is not a single country I am not worried about when it comes to the information war, though of course there are differences.

For Europe, I see the Russian war against Ukraine as the biggest challenge because dictatorships like Russia always have the advantage of controlling the information space. Public opinion is not just manipulated, it is also ignored whenever the regime decides to act.

In that sense, democracies are fragile. They can be manipulated from the outside, and there are plenty of collaborators on the inside. We do not pay enough attention to this. Our efforts to deal with the problem, or even to understand it, are ridiculous. This war on the battlefield in Ukraine and the connected information war is crucial for the future of Western democracy.

Stephen Douglas: Well I think in Europe, Ukraine is the key. So yourself — Heidi — Monique, Joni, and Dietmar, we're all engaged in the quotidian. We're watching the war unfurl, the 1200 kilometer contact line. We're reading (war correspondent) Zarina Zabrisky’s work in Kherson about first person view drones. We are looking and have been for the past two to three years at the Shahed drones coming in and watching the nature of warfare change before our eyes in a very granular way.

And when I then look at the conversation around the run-up to the attacks on Iran by the United States and chatter about ‘blowback’ as if we are still in the 1990s where all Iran has and all Russia has and all China has are a few missiles…

Ukraine is ground zero in understanding where warfare is today. and how it's changed and how it will come onto our streets. And the more we personally can understand about it, the more we'll be able to interpret reality and help people in Georgia and other countries.

Joni Askola: Many European countries raise concerns when it comes to information warfare and the integrity of future elections, but France stands out as particularly worrying — for several reasons.

The institutional structure of the French Fifth Republic, which tends to produce majority Governments rather than coalitions, makes the rise of populist parties more consequential than in countries like Germany, where coalition-building acts as a moderating force.

If the Rassemblement National (RN) wins the 2027 presidential election, it is quite plausible that it would also secure a majority in the legislative elections that follow, consolidating significant power.

Russia’s influence in France is another major concern. Currently, three of the top four presidential candidates in the polls are either openly sympathetic to Russia or have been influenced by pro-Russian narratives. In France, the horseshoe theory — where far-left and far-right ideologies converge — seems particularly relevant. Figures like Marine Le Pen, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and Bruno Retailleau have all expressed positions that are either insufficiently supportive of Ukraine or too accommodating toward Russia.

If a centrist candidate like Édouard Philippe fails to gain traction, France risks becoming a less reliable ally, more ambivalent toward Ukraine, and more open to authoritarian regimes. While current polling trends are troubling, there is still time before the 2027 elections. Nonetheless, the trajectory is concerning, and we should be paying close attention to developments in France.

Heidi Siegmund Cuda: Thank you to all the panelists for your wisdom and help navigating internet espionage and beyond.

What your knowledge reveals is the fact that Russian disinformation can be defeated. The Ukrainian people have suffered the most concentrated deluge of Russian disinformation of any people on Earth, and still they have found the capacity to resist. They are demonstrating a capacity to defend their country so fierce that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is turning into a quagmire that may yet topple Putin's regime.

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The above excerpt of my weekly Hot Type column was originally published Saturday, June 28, 2025, in Byline Supplement.

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Byline Festival: Finding the Light in Dark Times

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Related:

The Most Amazing Information Warfare Blitzkrieg in History

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