Social Baton - Spanish report on software links to Rubio, Cambridge Analytica, Russian FSB, Catalonia nationalists, etc 

Pérez Dolset, Leire Díez's partner in the plot against the UCO, provided the PP and PSOE with an electoral influence program designed in Russia.

[ Google translate from sauce ] 

https://www.elperiodico.com/es/politica/20250605/perez-dolset-socio-leire-diez-uco-programa-influencia-electoral-diseno-ruso-118241889

Madrid June 5, 2025, 6:00 AM

Updated June 5, 2025, 6:26 AM

Creating artificial conversations on social media as if they were authentic, diverting people's attention, detecting veins of interest, classifying influential people, segmenting audiences to inject them with ad hoc messages, demobilizing opponents, detecting smear campaigns and counterattacking … The software that businessman Javier Pérez Dolset distributed to select clients in 2015 has been used for all kinds of online political influence maneuvers - or manipulation .

Its last trading name was Social Baton . It was sold by Zed , the main company of the same man who today calls himself a victim of "the state's sewers" and who, sitting with socialist activist Leire Díez , co-chaired a video conference with lawyers and businessman Alejandro Hamlyn to dig up dirt on the UCO .

He provided the software to the Popular Party and PSOE technicians during two of its most difficult moments: the 2015 elections in which Mariano Rajoy was vying for re-election , and the period between the Andalusian elections of that year, in which the socialist Susana Díaz was at risk of losing power, and the PSOE primaries won by Pedro Sánchez in 2017.

Election campaigns in far western Europe… for which Russian -made mechanisms for canvassing and controlling public opinion were offered, the same techniques that the Kremlin has been perfecting, with a different intention, and which, due to their destabilizing potential, have been worrying state security for years. Engineers the company had hired in Russia contributed algorithms to the design of Zed's program—and later allegedly stole them.

High-level meetings:

Businessman Pérez Dolset confirms to this newspaper that he sold licenses for the Social Baton program to the Popular Party (PP) and Socialist parties. Furthermore, "I myself participated in two meetings ," he says. He does not deny that he also sold the system to other parties.

At the meeting he held with the PP in June 2015, Pérez Dolset recalls that the party's late historic electoral guru, Pedro Arriola , the Secretary of State for Communication at the time, Carmen Martínez Castro , and the then Deputy Secretary for Communication, Pablo Casado , were present .

Martínez Castro confirmed to EL PERIÓDICO that he attended a meeting with Pérez Dolset and a brother of the businessman . The two explained the program in Génova.

Pérez Dolset maintains that Susana Díaz and her campaign collaborators were present at her meeting with the Socialists. To this newspaper, the former Andalusian president categorically denies having sat down with the businessman: "Before meeting him these days on television, I had never seen him in my life." Susana Díaz's rivals in the war that the PSOE waged between 2016 and 2017 assured this newspaper that the faction opposing Pedro Sánchez "used a similar tool" to address members, after a poll among senior officials at 1,000 euros per person .

The price of the Zed license, which was around €100,000, has not been disclosed. The platform had been in development for eight years, and Zed was already able to charge more than the initial €6,000 it sold for in an early version… even though it had just opened branches in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

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Miraculous agitation:

Zed's Russian branch developed key algorithms for the program, sources familiar with the process explain. Pérez Dolset confirms: "It was created in different development centers, one of which was in Russia." In that field, "we were the first in the world," he asserts. Initially, the company called it Snap, and Snap Button. The first word stands for Social Network Analysis Platform.

The new product allowed users to process millions of data points from social networks , classify population segments, and analyze their reactions to stimuli or messages. A version of the program had also been sold by Zed in 2011 for the campaign of current US Secretary of State Marco Rubio , a Senate candidate in Florida.

PP and PSOE experts became interested in tools like Zed following the CiU case in 2010. For Artur Mas's victory in the Catalan elections , his then-election guru, Marc Vidal, had deployed an intensive digitalization of the campaign. Using the Cativistes.cat platform, he projected applications for Android and iPhone in search of vote-getting sources. In 2011, in the midst of the bubble crisis and the emergence of the 15M movement, a crowd laid siege to the Catalan Parliament. CiU's popularity plummeted, but once again the digitalization of the campaign saved it in the 2012 Catalan elections.

Following Rajoy's victory, Zed showed new clients a Social Baton dossier . It included a recommendation from Alfonso García Vicente, the PP's online campaign director . A confidential section of the report indicates that, in six months, the PP had used the snap in 300 Twitter campaigns .

In 2013, while Zed was developing its platform for intervening in public opinion, the firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) was founded in London as a branch of the defense contractor-hunting conglomerate SCL .

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CA is reportedly at the center of a scandal for using electoral influence programs based on illegally obtained lists of Facebook users. No similar fraudulent use has emerged in the Spanish case.

The niche business of data analysis was born in developed countries , the technique that allows for segmenting advertising, for companies, or propaganda, for political parties… or agitation and disinformation for the general staffs of hybrid warfare.

Zed Worldwide has been in Russia since 2006. Initially, it offered music and mobile video games, but by 2013 its catalogue had become more sophisticated . As the technology developed by Zed with Russian and Spanish technicians spread in Russia, an Armenian Jewish broker, Vage Engibaryan , appeared and offered Zed a link to a Russian investor, Mikjal Fridman , who had businesses in Europe and who had chaired the Dia supermarket chain in Spain .

The name of this catalyst has surfaced in Spain in one of the cases involving Fridman. The oligarch—a Ukrainian-born Jew—identified Engibaryan before the judge as "a friend," without mentioning any other trait: an employee at Alfa Group, a conglomerate founded by Fridman … with the same name as the special missions unit of the Russian secret service FSB.

In conversation with this newspaper, Pérez Dolset acknowledges that contact with Engibaryan. The Armenian invited him on a trip to the Negev, to travel the route of Moses through the desert. According to sources familiar with the Russian business environment prior to the war in Ukraine, it is the same kind of treat he extended to friends like Fridman.

The contact Engibaryan fostered with the Russian oligarch coincides with the months in which the Spanish businessman was attending events and parties held by the Putinist court, in an atmosphere of "addictive adrenaline," according to a representative of Spanish business leaders in Moscow at the time.

Pérez Dolset always stayed at the same hotel, the Hyatt Ararat , near the Bolshoi Theater. He occasionally confessed to collaborators that he felt he was being spied on. "Yes, constantly," he confirms today.

Putin 's courtiers were interested in the social media handler Zed shortly before the seizure of Crimea . Pérez Dolset points to the Internet Research Agency, a bot farm manager for disinformation and propaganda. It was headed by the late Yevgeny Prigozhin , who would also be the owner of the Wagner private militia .

Spanish diplomats in Moscow at the time believe it is significant how high Pérez Dolset was allowed to rise among regime officials. Among the leaders he met were Antón Vaino, Putin's chief of staff, and Vladislav Surkov, former deputy prime minister and ideologue of Putin's United Russia party, who espoused the theory of "managed democracy ." Basically, today's citizens cannot handle all the information available to them, and it is better for the state to manage it for them.

Pérez Dolset has confirmed those contacts that this newspaper has learned about from other sources. He adds details of conversations with a suddenly resentful Vaino toward the West : "He told me that Europe and the United States had brought Russia to its knees , and that Russia would never return to its knees." Shortly after, in November 2013, a pro-European rebellion against pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych thundered in Kiev's Maidan Square . In 2014, Russian soldiers without emblems, the Little Green Men , took over Crimea.

Zed also had relations at the time with Dmitry Kiselev , a very popular journalist who rose to become the head of Russia Today, RT , whose broadcasts are banned in the EU. Pérez Dolset does not confirm this, but he does sell content to Vesti FM, a station belonging to the pro-government VGTRK conglomerate , with Vaino's endorsement.

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On March 20, 2014, Russian authorities revoked visas for Pérez Dolset and its Spanish executives. The Zed Worldwide crisis began. The Spanish firm lost the 80 Russian employees it had in Moscow and St. Petersburg , some of whom were called away by local firms. The owner of the bankrupt company, under investigation by the National Court, claims that the algorithms for the Social Baton… and Glass Eye platforms were stolen .

The latter is used to analyze router traffic and predict user searches… in civilian life. In the military, a very similar technology is used in the Russian SORM-3 intelligence system.

According to a BBC investigation, Anton Vaino's Nooscope theory was popular among Russian developers of social media intervention programs at the time . In short, it advocates the need for tools to monitor all of citizens' online interactions in order to understand "global consciousness" and act upon it.

Spanish experts believe that Nooscope remains relevant both as a theory and as a line of technical work . The desired result of its application is called "poryadok" in Russian, which means "order."