Carole Cadwalladr has celebrated the one-year anniversary of her big Observer exposés with a brand new puff piece for each of the Brexit ‘whistleblowers’, complete with a fresh set of serious-looking photoshoots. Chris Wylie has gone for cactus green in his “clean, white, Scandinavian lines” new H&M office this time…

Carole does include a number of entertaining new nuggets about the talented Mr Wylie, including that he carries around $1,000 in cash when visiting New York, believes he has been poisoned, and “insisted on a chauffeur back and forth to his flat in London” from the tinfoil-hat gathering last Summer at the Byline Festival in Sussex. Staying in Damian Collins’ yurt apparently didn’t appeal to him…

Yet despite almost 4,000 words of gushing prose, in which she complains that “both Wylie and I have been constant targets of the right-wing blogsite Guido Fawkes, attack pieces by BuzzFeed, abusive tweets from the BBC’s Andrew Neil”, Carole curiously doesn’t find the time to mention the large lumbering elephant in the room, Wylie’s own company which he set up as a direct competitor to Cambridge Analytica. Offering all the same dubious data-targeting services…

Regular readers will recall he was one of the key people in designing Cambridge Analytica’s illicit voter-targeting techniques, Wylie then jumped ship to start his own company Eunoia Technologies in direct competition with them. Eunoia unsuccessfully touted its services to everyone from Donald Trump to Britain Stronger in Europe and Dominic Cummings, before finally securing a C$100,000 payday from Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party. Despite telling Damian Collins he hadn’t had any clients…

Naturally Cambridge Analytica weren’t best pleased about a former employee making off with their intellectual property and trying to poach a load of their existing clients, and took legal action against him. Wylie lost big time and was forced to provide “very wide ranging written undertakings to SCL [CA’s parent company]… that, in summary, he would not use SCL’s intellectual property and other commercial or confidential material (obtained whilst working with SCL) in the course of his own business enterprise.” Eunoia flopped and Wylie subsequently wound it up. Which surely played no part in Wylie’s decision to attack Cambridge Analytica a couple of years later…

Despite Carole’s relationship with Wylie and the fact that she has evidently been following Guido’s investigation in some detail, she has still failed to respond to Guido’s questions about what she knew or report on any investigations of her own into Wylie’s highly dubious Eunoia dealings, which seems a remarkable oversight for an investigative journalist. Carole is still bravely fighting “the fight to hold the culprits to account”, surely she isn’t being selective about which culprits she is trying to hold to account…

A new organisation has sprung up over the last few days calling itself the “Fair Vote Project”, committed to “publishing whistleblower evidence connected to possible cheating in the referendum”. It seems to exist solely to provide angry quotes at the bottom of Remainer newspaper articles claiming the referendum result is invalid. Given the “Fair Vote Project” is only interested in talking about alleged Leave overspending – not the overwhelming evidence of much greater Remain overspending – it will come as absolutely no surprise that it is run by Kyle Taylor, who used to work for ultra-Remain spin shop Best for Britain. And who is putting up the money for the Fair Vote Project? Only Byline Festival, run by Peter Jukes, the tin-foil hatted Twitter conspiracy theorist who makes Carole Cadwalladr look sensible. This is the level of conspiratorial nonsense ultra-Remainers are pushing…

Guido is sad to report that Peter Jukes and his Byline Media outfit have finally gone off the deep end. To the concern of their Twitter followers, over the last few days Jukes and Byline have been pushing increasingly deranged conspiracy theories that would make David Icke think twice. First, Jukes and his Byline colleague J.J Patrick suggested the Momentum agitators at the Rees-Mogg event were actually right-wing imposters, that the fracas was staged and that the Mogg was in on it. Just read this… it is worryingly delusional.

Jukes then doubled down on the conspiracy theory, implying that Steve Bannon taught Rees-Mogg about “creating events to trigger culture wars”.

This morning Jukes’ delusions have taken another turn for the worse. He is now suggesting on Twitter that the death threat sent to Zac Goldsmith’s 80 year-old constituent was faked, and that the death threat, the Rees-Mogg event and the new Tory campaign against intimidation have been “orchestrated” at the behest of Steve Bannon:

Sad…

This week the website Byline Media published an investigation into Russian Twitter troll accounts supposedly being used to subvert British democracy. Their story looked at one account, @Didgery77332, which purports to be based in Scotland. Byline reported that, due to the account’s support for Brexit, its tendency to retweet “Russian-inspired disinformation” and its poor grasp of the English language, @Didgery77332 was a Russian troll account:

“There’s a pretty convincing case Didgery is indeed a Russian troll… On balance, at the higher end of the probability scale, it was a fair assessment that this account appears to be a foreign-based troll pushing Russian messaging.”

Well, the Scotsman has checked out Byline’s report, and worked out that @Didgery77332 is actually a security guard and father based in Glasgow. The paper quickly found him and spoke to him:

“It’s not difficult to track me down. People might not agree with my opinions, but that doesn’t make me a Russian troll. I work 12 hour shifts, often standing at a gate for hours on end – posting on Twitter helps pass the time.”

A Byline conspiracy theory falls apart again… 

Try not to laugh too hard. The Leveson-compliant press regulator Impress has made its first adjudication, ruling against Byline Media, one of its most vocal defenders. Byline, the conspiracy theory site with tinfoil mad-hatter Peter Jukes as CEO, was found guilty of defaming tabloid journalist Dennis Rice and ordered to pay him £2,500 in damages. The irony is just too delicious. Byline signed up to Impress as part of its campaign against the tabloid press. Now Impress has ruled against them and forced them to write a £2,500 cheque to one of their main critics.

“Dennis Rice, the claimant, contacted IMPRESS to make a request for arbitration to settle a legal claim of defamation, harassment and malicious falsehood, arising from two tweets sent out from the Byline Media Twitter account on 6th March 2017. On 7th April, the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators appointed Clive Thorne as independent arbitrator for the case. In the award, Mr Thorne upheld the claim in part. He found one of the two tweets to be defamatory and ordered that damages of £2,500 be awarded to Mr Rice.”

Byline – which campaigns for higher media standards – has been officially found to publish fake news…

Byline Media, the website run by anti-free press obsessive Peter Jukes, is organising a festival on journalism in the “post truth era”… with The Canary. Over three days in June Byline will be hosting a line-up of press-hating speakers including John Cleese and Hugh Grant in a tent in Sussex, which they are genuinely billing as a “Woodstock for the Facebook generation”. The festival promises to “fight back against fake news” found in the mainstream media. Who best to lead the charge? Byline will be welcoming in Kerry Anne Mendoza, editor-in-chief of the infamous fake news site The Canary, which was behind the Portland coup conspiracy theory. Tells you all you need to know about the credibility of Byline and Jukes…