Applied Memetics - An Arlington Oddity

Applied Memetics - An Arlington Oddity
Applied Memetics, LLC is a social media marketing (read: manipulation) company based in Arlington, Virginia. It was founded by ex-CIA member Dan Gabriel, who recently came under fire on social media for publishing false tweets and pamphlets claiming that Ben Carson had dropped out of the presidential race during last night’s Iowa Caucus in order to redirect votes to Ted Cruz.

i.imgur.com/CZ8oqEs.png (evidence of tweets)
http://smpa.gwu.edu/gw-cia-and-beyond (Dan Gabriel background)

The company claims to bring “independent journalism” to areas lacking press freedom such as Cuba on its front page, but a deeper look paints them as more of an intelligence-agency-for-hire. Services like remote SIGINT collection (lifting text messages, phone calls, internet data), mass SMS propaganda broadcasting, and “leverage”, whatever that means, through social media like WhatsApp.

Applied Memetics lists a number of partners they have worked with in the past including Voice of America (US propaganda outlet used in conflict areas), the IT wing of the Veterans Affairs office, and the Broadcasting Board of Governors. It seems more and more as though their journalism isn’t quite as “independent” as they claim.

AM states that their mission is to generate “engineered influence” for their clients. This is accomplished through “exploiting and leveraging perception to create new realities on the ground”.

It would seem that these new realities are engineered for the benefit of government interests, as stated here:  “Simultaneously, state and non-state actors around the globe face a similar major challenge: harnessing the evolution of new, pervasive and powerful information and communication technologies.  Recent unrest in the Arab world, facilitated by these same trends, has underscored the need for governments to incorporate holistic approaches to governance in an age of social media.”

And here.

“ Our work is grounded in sociology, cognitive psychology, and information systems analysis.  In each of our projects, we define political outcomes in a variety of temporal ranges: a clearly articulated plan for achieving them; an understanding of audience receptivity and opposition levels; a clearly conceptualized delivery method; and, most importantly, a system of measuring success we call metrics. “
http://www.appliedmemeticsllc.com/content/vision (source of quotes)