Cyber-Enabled Information Operations: Lessons Learned from Human-Centric Research

This chapter provides a conclusion to the volume, Digital (Dis)Information Operations. The book aims to provide readers with an overview of some of the challenges of digital (dis)information operations confronting liberal democracies today, and offers insight into the ways in which governments, societies, and individuals can counter the problem. The authors, a contingent of primarily social scientists and humanities researchers, have strived to convey the important role that human-centric approaches to addressing cyber-enabled information threats have. Through doing so, we have sought to instil hope that the problem rooted in the apparent absence of the possibility of objective “truth” in the digital era is not insurmountable. Despite the technical enablers of digital information operations, it is fundamentally a social challenge, and a challenge that together, as social beings and societies, we can overcome. This closing chapter turns to the lessons learned from the constellation of research shared throughout this book, before considering the future of digital (dis)information operations.