It's decision time

I need your help in figuring out how to respond to Substack's monumental betrayal of Australians

Happy new year to all my readers and listeners!

You may have noticed that I didn’t send out a Christmas message. (Actually, you probably didn’t, since every man and his dog was flooding your inbox with generic wishes for a happy holiday season and all that jazz. I’m not narcissistic enough to think that you were hankering after a Christmas message from me.) I had vague plans to do so, but once my kids arrived, I just wanted to unplug and spend every minute with them. So anyway, belated Merry Christmas, and I hope you had ample opportunity to relax and enjoy some precious time with your family and friends.

Now that the hubbub of gift-buying and -giving and tree-decorating and cooking and feasting has abated, I’m taking some time to map out my direction for 2026 - and I’d really appreciate your input.

<Edit: I was going to include both dilemmas that I have to resolve in this one post, but decided to break it up into two separate posts so that I can hopefully get your full attention to both issues. Apologies if I’m overloading your inbox.>

First up, I need to decide whether to remain on Substack and if so, whether to turn off paid subscription options.

Substack’s monumental cowardice

Most of my Aussie subscribers will already be aware that Substack is now insisting on age verification for all Australian readers. Since Substack is not on the Australian government’s hit-list of ‘age-restricted social media platforms’, this came as a complete shock to me - and to the other Australian Substackers to whom I subscribe. The only communication that I have had from Substack regarding this matter is the following email, which I received on 11 December 2025:

Hi there,

We wanted to give you a quick heads-up that in order to comply with the Online Safety Act, Substack is introducing age verification steps for readers in Australia.

Here’s what to know:

• Your connection with your subscribers won’t change. The way you publish content for your audience remains the same. Your email list, publishing process, and relationship with your readers are not affected.

• Verifying your age is required to access the Substack app if you’re in Australia. Once verified, readers can continue to enjoy the full Substack experience as usual.

• Paid subscribers are already verified. Anyone with a credit card on file (for example, paid subscribers) is already considered verified—no extra steps are needed.

• Many readers are already verified. Because all online platforms must implement age verification, some users may have already completed this through Stripe or Persona and won’t need to do it again.

• Your data is private. The verification process is secure and handled by trusted providers like Stripe and Persona.

We’re complying with the Online Safety Act and are working to make this transition as smooth as possible for everyone. Please visit our policy page for more information on how the Online Safety Act may impact your content.

You can check your verification status here. If you’d like to encourage your subscribers in Australia to verify their age and avoid any interruptions, you can share the following message:

Australia’s Online Safety Act is requiring platforms like Substack to introduce age verification for readers.

Verifying your age is required to access the Substack app in Australia.

The process is secure and handled by trusted providers like Stripe and Persona.

To avoid any interruptions in seeing the great stuff on Substack, make sure you verify your age. For details on how to verify your age, or if you have questions, please visit Substack’s support page

Thanks for everything you do to help make Substack the home for great culture,

Standards and Enforcement @ Substack

While claiming that they oppose “laws aimed at reducing harm from online speech by requiring platforms to block, label, or collect identification before people can view certain content”, Substack’s founders have nonetheless scrambled to comply with the Online Safety Act 2021. The Act purports to “help safeguard Australians at risk of online harms and to promote safer, more positive online experiences”. Thank you, Daddy Government, for keeping me safe. </sarcasm>

One of the Act’s primary enforcement mechanisms is enabling “the eSafety Commissioner (eSafety), Australia’s independent online safety regulator [currently the thoroughly odious Julie Inman-Grant, who has been subpoenaed by the US Congress to answer for her violations of the free speech rights of Americans] to remove severely abusive and harmful online content”.

Substack’s weak excuse for bending the knee - rather than joining Reddit’s lawsuit against the Australian government’s “infringement of free political expression” - is as follows:

“In compliance with the OSA, we are required to provide Australian users with a way to report potentially illegal or age-restricted content.”

But the platform has always had a mechanism for reporting such content:

… and as far as I can see, insisting on age verification for Australian readers does not alter or augment that mechanism in any way.

Substack readers who use a credit card for paid subscriptions are already age-verified, but those who don’t will be forced to upload a selfie to Persona, a “comprehensive identity management platform” if they wish to access content they’ve subscribed to.

Let me be 100% clear: I strongly advise you not to verify your age using Persona or any other such third-party service. I’m pretty confident that if you regularly read my work, you’ll already understand why, but just in case you’re a dear, sweet, naive soul who still trusts the grubberment and its rent-seeking corporate henchmen to take care of you, I urge you to watch this interview, in which James Corbett and Iain Davis explain how the bars of the technocratic digital control grid are being slotted into place around us, via scum-sucking bottom-feeders providers of invaluable identity verification services like Persona:

For those of you who don’t understand how Substack makes money, they take 10 per cent of all paid subscriptions (and that’s on top of standard credit card processing fees). Only 2 per cent of my readers are paid subscribers, so Substack is not exactly a huge earner for me, but I have no desire to continue supporting this platform, financially or otherwise, in the light of their cowardly compliance with the tyrannical Australian government’s demands - especially when those demands were (as far as I know) not directed at them anyway.

But that leaves me with a dilemma. Substack provided a welcome haven for scamdemic dissidents like me, helping me build a loyal community of readers here, when YouTube was taking down my videos and Facebook was censoring my posts for “medical misinformation”. I really enjoy interacting with my subscribers and casual readers via the Comments section (which I always leave open, despite the occasional troll rearing its ugly head). And I recognise that many of you do not live in Australia and hence are not directly affected by Substack’s insistence on age verification. However, my sense is that if writers and readers do not punish Substack by abandoning the platform, en masse, for its supine cooperation with tyrannical legislation, we are essentially rewarding them for playing their part in constructing the technocratic control grid. And even worse, we’re signalling our willingness to comply with the technocrats’ diktats - just as standing 2 metres apart, wearing a silly mask and getting a convid jab signalled willingness to comply with that heinous branch of the agenda.

So, with all that said, I have a decision to make: should I leave Substack altogether, or should I continue publishing here but turn off paid subscriptions? If I leave Substack, or turn off paid subscriptions, will my current paying subscribers be willing to use another payment method to continue their current support of my work, for which I will be eternally grateful?

By the way, I already publish all my posts on my website, and you’re more than welcome to sign up to my mailing list so that you can receive notification of each new post.

I’ve explored other publishing platforms including Ghost and Beehiiv (thanks to a tip shared with Phillip Altman on his Substack), but these platforms are simply not viable for me given that they require a monthly paid subscription which would exceed what I currently earn from my small band of paying Substack subscribers. I’ll be delving into the financial viability of continuing to write posts at my current cadence, in a separate post.

If you’ve made it this far, I want thank you from the bottom of my heart for caring about this issue. I look forward to reading your feedback and suggestions: