Hot Type: Women On the Verge
Ahead of her upcoming Byline Festival panel, 'Women on the Frontline of the Information War', columnist Heidi Siegmund Cuda writes about her decade of living dangerously
I slip quietly into bookstores, face obscured by my Belfast cap.
Belfast in Northern Ireland is a city hard not to fall in love with — an air of fight and sorrow lingers, and I can relate.
As I snap a photo of a mural unwelcoming ‘Genocide Joe’ — this, after a full-throated spat with a pro-Russian ‘tankie’ running an anti-war pop-up boutique — I sigh, seeking out the comfort of the history and politics section of independent bookstores.
It’s there I find my people: rows of books by historians who have become my friends — who understand how events and words are twisted, wrung out of all reality, and respun into propaganda to benefit the ‘strongman’.
I have a book bag I carry filled with extra highlighters and always charged book lights, so any spare moment I can bury myself in words written by people who get it.
We are a decade into fighting an Invisible War — the Great Information War — and despite the fact that it’s affecting every last democracy on earth, there’s little will to fight back, and even more shocking, barely any acknowledgement the war even exists.
As I prepare for Byline Festival’s July panel, Women on the Frontline of the Information War, I’ve been reflecting on my decade of living dangerously.
As a veteran investigative reporter, who happened to be independent in 2016, I pressed send on my first anti-Trump blog post on September 17, 2016. Having spent my career in both broadcast news and print media, I had investigated Donald Trump and felt I had a duty to warn. He had a long history of conning people and was not fit for purpose.
I also recognized the vocabulary of misogyny he deployed in his speeches and interviews. A win for him would set women back decades.
So originally on my ‘Maewestside’ Tumblr I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. I warned and I warned and I warned. I read every indictment — including the Jane Doe indictment accusing Trump of raping a 13-year-old and also charging Jeffrey Epstein.
Surely, America was not going to propel itself back to the dark ages, back to a kind of brutal feudalism. Smh.
I view the 2016 presidential election as the greatest crime in US history, where American traitors collaborated with foreign adversaries to cheat citizens of reality. Disinformation was spread on social media in psychological warfare campaigns run by people in Russia and collaborators in the US who knew exactly what they were doing.
And we rolled. An adherence to ‘norms’ was more important than fighting back. A Women’s March movement formed, but it was quickly infiltrated and denigrated by teams operating out of St. Petersburg, Russia, pretending to be Americans.
We had no inoculation to information warfare, despite the same tactics being duplicated in dozens of countries globally.
The Trumpocene
So for me, the grind began. I spent the early days of Trumpocene investigating, researching, reading, reporting, marching, and doing everything I could to raise awareness that America had been hit by a new kind of war.
The battlefields were largely virtual — the casualties no less real. It was the invasion of the body snatchers, but in real life. The goal was menticide.
In a post-mortem investigation of the 2016 election, I wrote:
Twitter 2016 is a crime scene. The chalk outline around the decaying corpse is an ominous warning — metaphorical yellow tape serves as an attempt to keep people out. But I go in — probing the bombed out traces of memetic warfare. And navigating my way between the mounds of deleted tweets and suspended accounts, I forensically piece together the carcass of 2016 — an election stolen by Kremlin-sponsored attacks facilitated by misogynistic white nationalists — superspreaders of GRU lies.
Truth was in the crosshairs, being eroded one tweet at a time. We were losing our shared reality, and those on the frontline of pushing truth, became the targets of international ‘hit’ squads.
There was money to be made for nihilists, who didn’t mind destroying reputations of influential reporters, activists, academic and scientific experts. The campaigns to make truth-tellers radioactive were very effective, because the money was behind the liars so the negative campaigns were amplified creating the illusion of fake popularity, the appearance of social media mobs having more weight.
Denigration, abuse, name-calling, death threats — it changes a person.
Some in the cross-hairs of abuse campaigns fought back by swinging low — trying to fight fire with fire — but that largely just fuels the campaigns. The abusers could then play victim, further clouding the murky online seas.
I chose to block and move on, block and move on, attempting to give as little oxygen as possible to the abusers. I wasn’t always successful, but I found if I engaged in any defense, sunlight would fade and that meant less time for the work, and the work is what matters.
Make Empathy Great Again
One thing I did right was gather up allies and work in teams, and on the lowest days, when I would read something about myself that made me wince, I always had someone to call. They, too, were getting the ‘treatment’.
My friend, US security consultant Jackie Singh told me on one of those calls: “Why do you care what people who don’t love you have to say about you?”
Those words had some kind of magic.
I now make a point of surrounding myself with people who not only have love in their hearts, but empathy. The Information War is designed to strip once-loving people of empathy, and we need that quality more than ever. Make Empathy Great Again.
Anyone sticking their neck out on behalf of truth runs the danger of online attacks and even worse in authoritarian countries, where reporters are imprisoned and/or sent to psychiatric wards. But women reporters are disproportionately targeted with online abuse. A UNESCO study found that 73% of women journalists surveyed reported experiencing online violence in their work, with higher rates of intimidation, threats of violence, sexual harassment, and attempts to discredit their work compared to their male counterparts. Misogyny is a key abuse tactic and the biggest tell for a women reporter that a comment is inorganic. Adult humans can agree to disagree, but abuse campaign bots are spiked with misogyny.
Turning Off the Comments
A life-saver for me was when I learned I could turn off the comments from people I didn’t engage with on multiple platforms. That reduced the psychological battery down to a low pummel. The downside to that tactic is some of my greatest allies in the fight came from Twitter randos, who left smart comments on my threads. The upside is they can always give me a quote tweet. I can still find the real ones that way, without having to wade through terror tweets. To date, there is no harassment free zone — when I went over to Bluesky, three impersonator accounts had beat me to it, and I spent the first weeks mopping up their damage to my reputation before losing interest in yet another platform time-suck.
Today, I spend a lot less time on any social media, which gives me more time for the deep scholarly research required to be of use in this war.
I spend most of my time now looking further over the waves — trying to envision what our world can look like once we get beyond this authoritarian surge.
It can’t be a world where virtual battlefields like Facebook, X, and Telegram continue to platform hate speech, crimes against humanity, and paid liars — and where the platform owners behave like Soviet-era apparatchiks. Monopolies need to be broken, regulation by national governments needs to become paramount for a sustainable civil society. No more anonymous paid actors poisoning another nation by remote.
We made a huge mistake by dismissing them as ‘trolls’ and a bigger mistake failing to prosecute treason. We need to envision a world where citizens are protected from billionaires, not run by them.
Something’s Got to Give
I believe something will give. We are in the early stages of witnessing the evil people turn inward and devour each other — they are, after all, strange bedfellows linked by kompromat, cruelty, narcissistic personality disorder, and sociopathy.
Bombs are the last refuge of a scoundrel and often start dropping when truth gets loud, the kind of truth that puts wildly unpopular dictators with no succession plan at risk of termination. The truth that springs up when protests rise above the ability of the media to ignore them in favor of pathetic military parades.
Maybe it’s time to listen to women leaders, for a change.
It’s also a good day to amplify the work of women on the frontline of the information war. The world can use some clarity right now, and one way to muzzle shotgun propaganda is to listen to the women who’ve been exposing these cheap tricks for a decade.
As Carole Cadwalldr — the keynote speaker of Byline Festival 2025 — writes: “It’s not a Bake Off. It’s a global far-right insurgency.”
Join us in fighting back.
Join us at the Byline Festival. You will find the women’s panel details here.
Emmy award-winning investigative reporter, Heidi Siegmund Cuda is an American correspondent for Byline Times and her Hot Type column runs weekly in Byline Supplement. She is the co-host of RADICALIZED Truth Survives podcast and her Bette Dangerous Substack is read in 90 countries.