Conclusion

Abstract

This short chapter concludes ‘Digital Disinformation’ by recapitulating our thesis: in today’s world where there is a surfeit of open-source data, the best methods for making sense of that data are likely to be from the realm of unsupervised learning. To be effective in their mission, analysts of the information environment must also be grounded in cultural understanding, and in the case of Russia and its neighbors, there are distinct cultural factors that help explain contemporary data just as they have in generations past. But the Russian information environment is not monolithic; and voices on the ‘fringe’ in Russia give cause for hope that Russia is not locked into an inevitable negative spiral, and is not necessarily predetermined to be in conflict with the West. National salvation and a brighter future are possible, and a few voices ‘calling out in the wilderness’ show a simple (yet hard-to-grasp) way: accurately identifying the mistakes of the past and consciously turning away from them.