Week Ending June 19, 2026
This week, Amazon breaks the Kindle Unlimited record, and all that money is going directly into indie author pockets. Gavin Newsom made the New York Times bestseller list by buying $1.6 million of his books with PAC money. The US government killed the most powerful AI model available to authors just hours after our story on it last week. MailerLite slashes free accounts to 250 subscribers, so you have until July 1 to act. A suppressed UK report explodes to 32 million views on X with shockwaves that reach every author writing today.
PUBLISHING NEWS
Kindle Unlimited Global Fund Smashes All-Time Record at $66.9 Million
According to the official KDP Community Forum announcement posted this month, Amazon has supercharged the Kindle Unlimited engine with a record-shattering global fund.
Historic Fund Size
The KDP Select Global Fund for May 2026 hit $66.9 million, a new all-time high. That beats the previous record of $65.9 million set just two months earlier in March 2026. Total author earnings from Kindle Unlimited reached $70.3 million, boosted by a $3.4 million All Stars bonus layered on top of the base fund. The fund has climbed dramatically since its launch at just $2.5 million in July 2014, and May’s number marks the highest payout pool Amazon has ever released to KDP Select authors.
The KENP Rate Update
The per-page rate saw a modest uptick above April 2026’s $0.00482, once royalties finalized around June 15. Authors tracking the numbers confirm the May rate locked in slightly higher, delivering a small but welcome boost per page read. This remains one of the stronger rates in recent years, though it falls short of the early Kindle Unlimited peaks near $0.0058 per page back in 2014-2015 when the program was brand new and total pages read were far lower.
Amazon poured more money into the KU system than ever before, which means a larger overall pie for authors to share. The per-page rate is calculated by dividing the fund by total normalized pages read across every book on the platform. Even with massive reading volume, the bigger fund still translates to stronger earnings potential, especially for romance, mystery, thriller, and other KU-dominant genres. A 300-page novel read cover-to-cover now generates roughly $1.45 in base KENP earnings before any All Stars boost.
What This Means for Authors
Record fund size signals Amazon’s continued heavy investment in Kindle Unlimited as a core driver of ebook consumption and author revenue. The combination of a bigger pot plus a slightly improved rate gives KDP Select participants a measurable tailwind heading into summer reading season. All Stars bonuses continue to reward top-performing titles with extra checks on top of the already expanded base fund. Authors should check their finalized Prior Month’s Royalties report now for exact May numbers, including any All Stars column that appears once the month closes.
Amazon just proved it is willing to keep feeding the KU machine at record levels. For authors who understand how to leverage the platform, that is very good news.
Sources:
KDP Community Forum: KDP Select Global Fund and All Stars Bonus Update – May 2026
Amazon KDP Help: Royalties in Kindle Unlimited
Written Word Media: Up to Date list of KDP Global Fund Payouts
Commentary:
Thomas: The pot of money is deeper than it’s ever been, and the per-page rate is better than it’s been in a long time. That tells me readers are not binge-reading AI slop.
There are more books than ever before, so you face more competition than ever before. But if you can convince readers to read your book, the money in the Kindle Unlimited fund is very good, and that’s on top of your print sales, ebook sales, and audiobook sales. There are a lot of different ways to make money inside the Amazon ecosystem.
Jonathan: Personally, I think the rising rate reflects readers gravitating toward quality as AI-generated content floods the market. Readers are choosing carefully, and that’s an overall benefit to authors who are putting in the work.
Bookvault Launches Marketplace Allowing Direct Sales With a Clear 10% Platform Cut
According to Bookvault’s official announcement, Bookvault Shop combines ecommerce, print-on-demand printing, and global distribution into one platform. Authors create their own online bookstore, sell print books directly to readers worldwide, and let Bookvault handle automatic fulfillment without managing inventory, packing, or shipping.
Pricing Model
Bookvault reduces the print price by 5% for books sold on the platform. The company then takes a 10% cut of sales. That cut rises to 20% if the customer uses a promo code. Promo codes serve as a key promotion tool that authors can deploy strategically on their store. Authors can also group titles into collections, such as a full series, and run targeted promotions on specific collections.
Payment, Tax, and Integration
Credit card payments process through Stripe and currently support USD and GBP, with expansion underway. Bookvault acts as the merchant of record for sales tax purposes, so authors don’t have to handle sales tax at all. Authors receive their own dedicated page through the Bookvault portal and simply add a hyperlink from their existing website. No complex integrations are required.
Current Limitations
No email list growth: while readers can subscribe to receive notifications from Bookvault, authors don’t get readers’ email addresses. This is still an advantage of using PayHip over Bookvault. No Facebook Pixel on book pages is available yet, though the company noted the request and plans to consider it, making Bookvault a poor option for Meta advertising. You can link to your Bookvault sales page, but you can’t integrate that page into your website.
Why This Matters for Authors
Direct sales have long required authors to juggle multiple tools, payment processors, tax compliance, and fulfillment logistics. Bookvault Shop removes those layers for anyone already printing with the company. The 10% to 20% platform cut makes this far more profitable than selling on Amazon. Collections and promo code tools add practical promotion power without extra platforms. Merchant of record status further reduces administrative burden.
The launch push began June 15. Authors who activate the shop early can establish strong positioning inside the marketplace at shop.bookvault.app and test the economics with real sales data. Bookvault Shop is live now and gives authors a full direct sales system with transparent pricing and minimal operational overhead.
Sources:
Bookvault official announcement: Introducing Bookvault Shop
Live marketplace: shop.bookvault.app
Commentary:
Thomas: This is the easiest way to sell direct, particularly if you already use Bookvault for fulfillment. A lot of authors who run Kickstarter campaigns already have a Bookvault account. All you’d need to do is link to your Bookvault page from your book page with a “Buy Direct” button, and you keep 80% to 90% of the money.
Bookvault is UK-based, so I was concerned American buyers might face a foreign transaction fee. It turns out that’s not the case. They support US dollars natively.
Unfortunately, they do not have a way to capture email addresses from customers. The email capture limitation comes down to GDPR. I suggested they add an unchecked opt-in checkbox at checkout to allow readers to subscribe, but for now, Bookvault will notify readers if you have a new book, which isn’t the same as getting them on your own newsletter.
If you’re running advanced advertising, I still recommend the PayHip/Bookvault combination. You can use Bookvault for fulfillment while PayHip integrates better with your website and supports pixel tracking. Without a Facebook Pixel at checkout, there’s no way to know if your ads are converting. Once Bookvault adds that, it’ll become a genuinely powerful option for conversion ads.
On the 5% print cost reduction: that’s a reduction in the cost to print the book, so the effective cut is slightly less than 10% of gross sales. The math is a little confusing, but however it shakes out, it’s a better deal than Amazon.
Jonathan: Bespoke editions are currently only printed by UK printers, so readers buying a special edition through your Bookvault store will pay UK shipping rates.
Thomas: For a bespoke edition priced at $50 or $100, paying $5 to $10 for international shipping is a much smaller percentage of the purchase than it would be on a standard $20 book. Buyers of premium editions tend to be less price sensitive to shipping costs.
How Gavin Newsom Bought His Way Onto the New York Times Bestseller List
According to the New York Post on April 21, 2026, California Gov. Gavin Newsom secured a spot on the New York Times bestseller list through a coordinated campaign that relied heavily on political action committee funds to drive bulk purchases rather than organic retail demand.
The Bulk Purchase Play
Newsom’s PAC, Campaign for Democracy, paid $1.6 million to Porchlight Book Company for roughly 67,000 copies of his memoir Young Man in a Hurry. Those copies accounted for about two-thirds of the book’s total print sales of 97,400 units tracked by Circana BookScan. Newsom promoted the deal directly to his email list: donate any amount and receive a free copy. His team also staged promotional events in Atlanta, New York City, Boston, and other cities to move inventory. Federal filings show the PAC spent an additional $58,000 on related merchandise and shipping to 18 bookstores.
Newsom framed the effort in emails as both a fundraising tool and a path to bestseller status. One February note explicitly urged supporters to buy the book to help it land on the New York Times list.
How the Numbers Cleared the List
The memoir appeared on the New York Times combined print and ebook nonfiction bestseller list dated March 15, 2026, landing at number four. Editors attached a dagger symbol (†) to the entry, their standard marker for titles whose sales include a significant mix of organic and bulk or institutional purchases. The tactic worked. The book reached the list. The dagger simply disclosed the method.
The New York Times Bestseller List Is Not a Pure Sales Ranking
The New York Times compiles its lists from confidential weekly sales reports submitted by thousands of retailers nationwide. Editors statistically weight the data and apply proprietary vetting. Official methodology states that institutional, group, or bulk purchases are included only at the discretion of the Best-Seller List Desk editors. When included, they must carry the dagger.
This structure received formal legal recognition in the 1980s. Author William Peter Blatty sued the New York Times after it excluded his novel Legion despite strong reported sales. The Times successfully argued that the bestseller list constitutes editorial content protected by the First Amendment, not objective factual reporting of sales data. Lower courts upheld that position. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal. The list has never been a straight mathematical ranking of total books sold.
What the Dagger Signals to Authors
The New York Times retains the editorial power to decide which bulk purchases count and whether to flag them. Similar bulk-buy controversies previously triggered daggers or removals for books by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Authors who pursue New York Times status through heavy preorders or bulk orders can clear the threshold, but the dagger travels with the claim and tells the industry the sales were not driven solely by reader demand.
Implications for Authors Chasing the List
Coordinated bulk strategies can deliver the “New York Times bestseller” line for marketing materials. They also invite public scrutiny and the visible dagger when editors detect the pattern. The 1980s court precedent confirms authors have no legal right to demand inclusion based purely on sales volume. Readers and industry professionals increasingly recognize the dagger as a signal that a meaningful share of the reported sales came through organized channels rather than individual purchases. Newsom’s campaign converted political infrastructure into book-sales velocity and achieved the desired ranking. The dagger simply made the method visible.
Sources:
New York Post: Gavin Newsom hit with humiliating New York Times ‘bestseller’ asterisk
New York Times: How Gavin Newsom Boosted His Book Sales With $1.5 Million From His PAC
New York Times Best Sellers Methodology
Commentary:
Thomas: The dagger indicator is common in nonfiction. Professional speakers in particular will pay for it, because being a New York Times bestselling author can boost speaking fees from $10,000 to $15,000 or $20,000 per event. You only need a handful of additional bookings at the higher rate to recoup a $100,000 investment. Newsom spent closer to $1.6 million, but the political calculus is different.
How much it costs to get on the list depends on what other books are doing that week. You can’t know for sure in advance. And the list is not a straightforward sales ranking. The New York Times tweaks the scales, so some sales count more than others, and they can exclude a book for editorial or political reasons. Amazon sales, for instance, historically haven’t counted.
The most famous recent example is Jordan Peterson’s book, which was one of the bestselling books on all of Amazon in 2019, yet never appeared on the Times list. The explanation they gave was that his publisher was Canadian, which isn’t a real criterion since many Canadians have made the list.
I don’t recommend this strategy for most authors. It makes sense for politicians because they can give away the copies at rallies and they have donor infrastructure to fund it. Gavin Newsom can now market himself as a New York Times bestselling author, which matters for a potential presidential run. That’s the ROI.
Ron Paul got there without buying copies because his supporters are so ideologically committed they bought in volume organically. Marco Rubio’s book hitting the list was genuinely life-changing for him. He was still carrying student loan debt as a sitting US senator and was able to pay it off after the bestseller run.
Jonathan: The list is curated, not calculated. The New York Times chose to put it on the list and attach the dagger. That was an editorial decision.
Newsom is in a different position than Ron Paul. He’s not an ideological figurehead with a deeply committed base willing to buy his book on principle. He’s more of a celebrity, which means you need to manufacture the volume rather than organically generate it. For a politician eyeing a presidential run, you can’t release a book and not be on the Times list.
AUTHOR ALERTS
Did Your AI Book Cover Help Fund the Future of Medicine?
According to Midjourney’s official announcement on their medical blog, the AI company revealed plans for a full-body “Ultrasonic CT” scanner that captures detailed 3D body maps in a target time of under 60 seconds with no radiation or strong magnets.
The device submerges a person on a slow-moving platform into a shallow pool of warm water while a ring of roughly half a million tiny ultrasonic transducers fires sound waves from every angle. Midjourney AI then reconstructs detailed three-dimensional maps of muscles, organs, fat, and bone down to fractions of a millimeter.
Midjourney operates as a self-funded, community-backed research lab with zero outside investors. Revenue from everyday users paying for image generations and subscriptions directly finances all operations and ambitious R&D, meaning revenue from author subscriptions and generations directly supports this hardware pivot into proactive health imaging.
The first Midjourney Spa is targeted for San Francisco by the end of 2027, with an ambitious long-term goal of 50,000 scanners worldwide.
Sources:
Midjourney: A New Era of Midjourney (official announcement)
Butterfly Network statement on the partnership and technology
Commentary:
Thomas: When I first saw this story, I assumed it had to be a different Midjourney company. A company doing ultrasonic CT scanning without radiation or magnets seemed completely unrelated to the AI image tool authors use for book covers. But it’s the same company, and they’ve taken no outside investment. All the funding for this medical research came from subscriptions and image generations.
If you’ve ever felt guilty about using an AI book cover, consider that by reducing the cost and time of a full-body scan, the technology could allow people to establish baselines and detect tumors years earlier than current methods allow. You contributed to that innovation.
TECHNOLOGY
Is ChatGPT Becoming the AOL of AI? New Open Model Says Maybe
According to Zhipu AI’s official blog post published June 17, 2026, their GLM-5.2 model launched with a 1-million-token context window and full MIT open weights.
The 744-billion-parameter coding specialist scored 81.0 percent on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and 62.1 percent on SWE-Bench Pro, outperforming GPT-5.5 while staying within 1 percent of Claude Opus 4.8 on long-horizon engineering tasks. The gap between Chinese labs is closing faster and faster. Right now, only Anthropic’s Opus and Fable models can beat the Chinese models across all benchmarks.
Majority of AI Users Have Already Switched Away from ChatGPT
According to analytics firm Sensor Tower’s State of AI Report for 2026, ChatGPT’s True Audience share fell to 46.4% by the end of May. That marks the first time the pioneer chatbot has dropped below 50% since it launched the modern AI boom.
ChatGPT still leads with over 1.1 billion monthly active users and remains the largest single player. Google Gemini captured 27.7% of the share, equating to 662 million monthly users, driven by deep integration into Android, search, and Google’s ecosystem. Anthropic’s Claude reached 10.3%, or 245 million monthly users, with particularly strong gains among professional and high-intent users. Grok, Perplexity, DeepSeek, and Meta AI each hold less than 5% individually. The top three assistants, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, dominate time spent, while overall hours on generative AI apps doubled year-over-year to roughly 36 billion in the first half of 2026. ChatGPT’s share slipped from above 50% in January to 46.4% by May’s end. Some acceleration came after OpenAI’s February defense contract, which triggered a surge in US uninstalls as users sought alternatives aligned with different values.
This shift reflects a maturing market where users increasingly switch between tools rather than staying loyal to one.
Sources:
TechCrunch: ChatGPT’s market share slips below 50% for first time
Sensor Tower State of AI 2026 Report
Zhipu AI GLM-5.2 Official Blog
Stanford HAI 2026 AI Index Report
Commentary:
Thomas: This is a huge deal. Before now, the Chinese labs were six to nine months behind. Chinese AI models are now outperforming ChatGPT on some benchmarks, and that has not happened before. These models also cost a fraction of what American models cost, so if performance is comparable, users will shift.
The OpenAI defense contract triggered some uninstalls, but friction is high enough that ideology alone doesn’t move most people. The real problem with ChatGPT is that it’s getting worse, particularly for writing. In my opinion, ChatGPT 4 was a magical model that has outperformed every subsequent version.
Claude’s models, by contrast, keep getting better. An author emailed me today asking whether to switch to Claude, and my answer was yes.
This is also why I expect the US government to resolve the Fable 5 situation quickly. It doesn’t make strategic sense to restrict an American frontier model when Chinese models are catching up this fast.
MailerLite Slashes Free Plan Again
According to MailerLite’s official Free Plan Update FAQ, the company rolled out significant changes to its free tier on June 16, 2026. Existing free accounts transition to the new structure on July 1, 2026. New free signups feel the impact immediately.
Active subscriber limit drops from 500 to 250 (unique active email addresses; unsubscribed or bounced contacts do not count toward the cap). Monthly email sends fall from 12,000 to 2,500. The limit resets based on each account’s registration anniversary. New hard caps appear on features: maximum three automations, three forms, one digital product, one landing page, and one website. Campaigns stay unlimited. User seats increase from one to two. Several premium-style tools now unlock on free: custom campaign and landing page templates, blogs, promotional pop-ups, and the HTML campaign editor.
Exceeding the subscriber cap locks campaign and automation sending. Forms and landing pages can still collect new subscribers, but excess contacts do not enter the list until the user prunes or upgrades.
MailerLite states the goal is to help users grow from day one by unlocking more professional tools earlier, while creating sustainable limits that improve platform performance, reliability, and email deliverability. The company also aims to reduce misuse of the free tier.
Context from Prior Change
This marks the second tightening in under a year. In September 2025, MailerLite halved the free subscriber limit from 1,000 to 500 while keeping the 12,000-email allowance. The latest move cuts both core limits more aggressively.
Early Reaction
Reactions have been pointed. Author George Saoulidis posted that he already left MailerLite for a cheaper self-hosted newsletter setup after the repeated reductions. Community and heritage groups called the changes greedy and unsustainable for low-volume users. Some users expressed surprise that the announcement email framed the update as adding features rather than highlighting the cuts. Competitors quickly highlighted their own free tiers in replies, including Kit (free up to 10,000 subscribers) and EmailOctopus (free up to 2,500 contacts).
Why This Matters for Authors
Many indie authors and podcasters rely on MailerLite’s free plan to run reader magnets, welcome sequences, launch automations, and regular newsletters without upfront cost. The new 250-subscriber ceiling arrives at a common early growth milestone. The 2,500-email monthly cap becomes restrictive once lists include multiple automations or more frequent sends.
Authors who built workflows around the old free plan will need to deactivate excess assets or upgrade. Paid plans start around $10.80 per month (billed annually) for the Comfort tier at 500 subscribers.
What Authors Should Do Now
Log into your MailerLite account immediately and check your current active subscriber count and recent email usage. Clean inactive or disengaged subscribers before the July 1 transition. Audit automations, forms, landing pages, and digital products against the new caps and deactivate anything over the limit. Compare total cost of ownership against alternatives such as Kit’s generous free tier. Decide whether to upgrade, migrate, or accept the tighter constraints before sending ability locks.
Sources:
MailerLite Free Plan Update FAQ
Commentary:
Thomas: Kit (affiliate link) has been moving in exactly the opposite direction, expanding its free tier to compete with Substack, now up to 10,000 subscribers. MailerLite has cut its free tier in half twice in under a year. If they follow the MailChimp playbook, the free tier disappears entirely. Authors just getting started today are going to choose Kit.
That said, MailerLite doesn’t really target authors. Its audience is small businesses, which move past 250 subscribers quickly and have money to spend. That’s why this cut makes sense for their business even if it frustrates the author community.
MailerLite is still a reasonable option if you’re paying for email. It’s cheaper per subscriber than Kit. But about one in ten authors prefers the MailerLite interface, and they are vocal about it. The vast majority find Kit easier to use.
My recommendation is Kit (afiliate link). I built my free Send Your First Email Challenge course entirely around it, and I’ve felt great about that decision ever since. Kit does everything Substack does, plus it handles reader magnets, integrations, and selling. If you want something free and easy, Kit wins. MailerLite’s only remaining edge is cost for paying users.
Jonathan: The strategy is to unlock more tools on the free tier to get users hooked. By the time they have enough subscribers to need more capacity, they’re fully invested in the platform and have to upgrade. It’s a reasonable business move, but framing a cut as a feature launch wasn’t a great look.
Authors Lose Access to Anthropic Fable 5
Just hours after the previous episode covered how remarkable Fable 5 was, access was cut globally.
According to Anthropic’s official statement released June 12, 2026, the US government issued an export control directive ordering the company to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. Because Anthropic could not reliably separate users by nationality in real time, the company disabled both models for every user worldwide. All other Claude models remain available.
Fable 5 launched just three days earlier on June 9, 2026. Anthropic positioned the model as its most capable publicly available system yet, built for long-horizon agentic work. Many authors and creators immediately adopted it for complex tasks like full manuscript planning, deep research synthesis, multi-chapter outlining, and advanced editing workflows.
The government acted after reports of a jailbreak. David Sacks, co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and the administration’s former AI czar, stated that a trusted partner discovered a method to bypass Fable 5’s guardrails. This allegedly exposed underlying Mythos 5 cyber capabilities that Anthropic itself had previously described as warranting cyberweapon-level regulation. The administration reportedly asked Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to fix the issue or withdraw the model. According to Sacks, Anthropic refused and downplayed the jailbreak as narrow and non-serious. The government then issued the export control directive citing national security authorities.
Anthropic pushed back hard in its statement. The company said it reviewed the reported technique and found it revealed only minor, previously known vulnerabilities that other public models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, can also surface without any bypass. Anthropic argued that recalling a model over a narrow issue sets a dangerous precedent that could halt frontier model releases across the entire industry.
Anthropic has already dispatched senior staff to Washington. Reports indicate chief compute officer Tom Brown and head of public policy Sarah Heck met with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross to negotiate a resolution.
Fable 5 represented a leap in agentic capability that many writers had started integrating into daily workflows. Authors now rely on remaining Claude models, GPT-5.5, Grok, Gemini, or ensemble tools like OpenRouter Fusion. The episode also signals a new era of direct government intervention in specific AI model deployments through export controls tied to user nationality and perceived dual-use risks.
Sources:
David Sacks X post detailing government account of events
Wall Street Journal: Anthropic Dispatches Staff to D.C. to Resolve Export Restrictions
Fortune: Anthropic Disables Fable and Mythos Under Export Controls
Commentary:
Thomas: This is a perfect example of a man digging a pit and falling into it himself.
Anthropic has spent years pursuing regulatory capture, trying to get AI regulated so they don’t have to compete with new entrants. The problem is that any regulation from the EU, US, UK, or Canada has zero impact on Chinese labs, which are the actual competitive threat and are cheaper to boot.
Their strategy was to market themselves as the most dangerous AI company in the world, hoping to get the whole industry regulated. Instead, they handed the government a custom-made argument to regulate them and only them. When they told their lawyers “This is politically motivated,” the lawyers said, “Didn’t you say you were dangerous?” They had no defense.
They compounded it by banning Pentagon use of their models. If you want the government to be friendly when it regulates you, poking them with a stick for two years is a poor strategy.
The jailbreak itself was almost comically simple. If you asked Fable 5 to find security vulnerabilities in a piece of code, it refused. But if you asked it to fix bugs in the same code, it would find all of them, including every security vulnerability, and you just read through for what you needed. The world’s easiest jailbreak.
Long term, this could become good marketing for Anthropic, the way Apple turned the federal government’s teraflop export ban on the Power Mac G4 into a memorable ad campaign. Anthropic’s model is so powerful the government shut it down. That’s a headline. But it doesn’t help authors who were using Fable 5 in their workflows today.
Jonathan: After Anthropic said all that, the government’s response was essentially, “So you’re dangerous and you won’t cooperate with us.” The export control directive followed immediately. Anthropic now has no allies in Washington to push back through. The resolution, if it comes, will require negotiating from that weakened position.
UK to Track Adults Online & Ban Kids From Social Media in Sweeping New Surveillance Move
According to the UK government’s fact sheet on new rules to protect children online, published this week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s administration will ban children under 16 from social media platforms starting in spring 2027. The announcement follows a consultation that drew more than 116,000 responses and uses new powers in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026, which amends the Online Safety Act 2023.
The ban targets user-to-user platforms whose main purpose is social interaction through posts and algorithms. Named examples include TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and X. Messaging services such as WhatsApp and Signal remain available so children can contact known family and friends. Sixteen- and 17-year-olds keep social media access, but livestreaming and stranger contact features switch off by default. Regulations go to Parliament before the end of 2026, with Ofcom enforcing age assurance. Platforms that fail face fines up to 10 percent of global revenue or potential blocking orders.
Age Verification Turns Child Protection into Adult Tracking
The government requires platforms to verify ages with methods Ofcom will define, including facial recognition, government ID uploads, or third-party checks. Adults must therefore submit identification or biometric data to access or maintain accounts on major services. The Online Safety Act already pushed age checks on pornography and harmful-content categories starting in July 2025. The new rules extend that infrastructure. The result is a growing database of verified adult users held by platforms and third-party verifiers. What began as a child-safety measure now compels routine identity checks for everyday internet use.
Australia’s Similar Ban Proved Ineffective Within Months
Australia enacted a comparable under-16 social media ban that took effect December 10, 2025. Six months later, reporting from The New York Times and surveys show the policy largely failed. More than 60 percent of Australian 12- to 15-year-olds retained access to at least one restricted service.
Children bypassed restrictions through VPNs, parents’ IDs or facial recognition, printed face masks to defeat biometric checks, and repeated account creation. eSafety officials claimed millions of accounts were removed initially, yet many pre-existing accounts remained active and new workarounds spread rapidly. The experience demonstrates that determined teenagers treat age gates as speed bumps rather than barriers.
Why This Matters for Authors
Indie and traditional authors rely on social platforms for discovery, newsletter growth, and direct sales, especially when targeting YA and younger readers. Age gates and heightened moderation to avoid fines will shrink organic reach on major apps. Platform compliance often produces broader content scrubbing that spills into marketing and community discussion. The same verification systems that track adults for safety also create new data pipelines and potential self-censorship incentives. Authors who build audiences on alternative or decentralized spaces may gain relative advantage, but the overall environment grows more fragmented and regulated.
The UK government frames these steps as giving children their childhood back. The architecture it is building, however, demands identity checks from everyone while leaving workable bypasses and messaging loopholes intact, the same pattern that already unraveled Australia’s version in under six months.
Sources:
GOV.UK Fact Sheet: New rules to protect children online
LBC: Liz Kendall confirms Bluesky included in under-16s ban
The New York Times: Australia’s Social Media Ban Is Floundering
Inside Global Tech: Online Safety in the UK
Commentary:
Thomas: The real purpose here is not child safety. To prove you’re not a child in the UK, you have to provide government ID. And because the UK arrests more people for online speech than almost any other country, around 30 people per day, the one protection people have is anonymity. This law eliminates it. Once a government ID is linked to a social media account, authorities can retroactively search your entire posting history for anything that could be charged as offensive.
The UK has been releasing violent offenders early to make room for people convicted of online speech violations. Imprisoning someone for two or three years for a meme doesn’t de-radicalize them. It tends to do the opposite. This is a shortsighted policy even on its own terms.
They’re modeling this on Australia’s ban, but Australia at least has a stronger free speech tradition and isn’t arresting people for social media posts. The Australian version failed within six months, and the UK version will face the same bypasses. The difference is that the UK has much sharper legal teeth for what you say once they know who you are.
Jonathan: How do you spy on adults? You frame it as protecting the children. The age verification infrastructure does far more to identify and track adults than it does to stop determined teenagers from getting online.
ZEITGEIST
Zeitgeist: The UK Rape Gang Inquiry Report Is Out
Thomas: There was a big rape gangs report in the UK. It’s going mega viral, and certain media outlets are completely ignoring it. If you don’t know about it, it’s because you’ve been isolated in an information-dampening channel. Look it up and read the report.
This is an independent report instigated by a member of parliament, and it’s gotten a lot of attention.
A victim of rape complained online about being raped by migrants. The police came to her house and arrested her for saying racist things about the men who raped her. They did not arrest the rapists. When people in the UK see instances like this, where even rape victims get arrested for complaining about their attackers, it has a chilling effect.
Almost no one in the UK is talking about this report publicly because they are terrified of their own government sending police to their door to put them in prison.
Jonathan: The independent crowdfunded inquiry compiled court records, prior inquiries, and over 20 survivor accounts across 149 local authority districts. It’s a 219-page document that estimates at least 250,000 young white British girls suffered repeated rape, gang rape, trafficking, torture, forced pregnancy, and Islamic conversion at the hands of organized grooming gangs.
It concludes that 87% of convicted perpetrators in group-based child sexual exploitation cases bore distinctly Muslim names, predominantly from Pakistani heritage, operating under clan codes and cultural attitudes that treated non-Muslim girls as inferior and available for exploitation.
Grooming typically began with gifts of alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes, followed by collection from school gates and care homes, then repeated group assaults, transport between locations, blackmail via recordings, and forced conversions.
Police, social services, schools, the NHS, and successive governments allegedly returned victims to abusers and suppressed ethnicity data out of fear of racism accusations.
Thomas: In one account in the report, a girl who was being raped went to a police station. The police put her in a car, drove her back to the house where she was being raped, handed her back to her abusers, said, “Have fun with her,” and drove off.
Jonathan: Recommendations include automatic deportation for every foreign national convicted, loss of citizenship and deportation for dual nationals, and deportation proceedings for family members who supported or failed to report the crimes.
Nigel Farage, the leader of the Reform UK Party, the one that crushed everyone in the last election in Britain, framed the findings as evidence of colonization and institutional cowardice driven by political correctness. A separate statutory government inquiry into grooming gangs continues its work, while the National Crime Agency has already ordered police to reopen hundreds of cold cases dating back to 2010.
How does the scale of this compare to other atrocities?
Thomas: For people who’ve had access to non-UK news sources, grooming gangs shouldn’t be a surprise. I wasn’t surprised by the material in the report. I was surprised by the scope: a quarter million girls, children in many cases, were the victims.
The mind breaks with big numbers, so here’s some scale for comparison. The Rape of Nanking, the worst rape event of World War II, involved an estimated 20,000 women. This report covers 250,000 victims. That’s as much as 10 times worse than the Rape of Nanking. And the Epstein files, which everyone is rightly outraged about, involved roughly 1,200 victims. This is 200 times more victims than the Epstein files.
The response in the UK has been muted online because people are genuinely afraid. Peaceful protesters are being arrested. I saw footage of a man arrested with his five-year-old son present. Police dragged the crying child away from his mother into a police car. Another peaceful, unmasked protester had his head rammed into a metal post by police. There were disputed reports about whether he survived or just suffered a brain injury.
Meanwhile, the protesters in Belfast who dress in black, put on masks, and leave their phones at home face no consequences because they’re engaged in direct violence. In the UK, people have stopped talking and started acting.
Why did the British government let this go on for so long?
Thomas: There was a phrase we discussed in our members-only Belfast episode: “I don’t think you are, mate.” It effectively shut down all debate. It comes from what British police said to a young man who’d been stabbed by a migrant. The man said, “I’m bleeding, I can’t breathe.” The police said, “I don’t think you are, mate,” handcuffed him, and let him bleed to death on the ground because he was accused of saying something racist.
The UK zeitgeist has held that racism was worse than rape. It was the worst sin a person could commit, and the whole apparatus of government was structured around punishing racists more severely than any other kind of criminal.
Jonathan: A lot of this comes from the British feeling the need to apologize for colonizing the world. After 50 or 60 years of being told they’re colonizers, institutions decided they could never be racist, whatever that required. As a result, they threw aside the objective standard of justice, which is, “Don’t rape kids.” The police had no institutional backing to do anything to save these girls.
Why is it important for Americans to speak up about this?
Thomas: There is a growing longing among a certain element of young American men to invade Britain. Americans have never wanted to invade Britain before. A surprising number of the restless young men who cause problems if left without purpose are now expressing this.
I don’t think Donald Trump is aware of this yet. Trump has a high respect for the British Crown, and there’s no way he would invade the UK. But there’s a risk he’ll bring up what’s happening at a rally, hear the crowd’s reaction, and understand the depth of the feeling.
Each week, something happens that’s worse than the week before. We thought the man stabbed to death in Belfast was the worst thing, and then this report came out. It’s important for Americans to speak about this because we are not afraid of the British government, especially on the 250th anniversary of our ceasing to be British.
The British will get arrested for complaining about their government and using naughty words while doing it. Americans won’t.
What does the law of hospitality have to do with any of this?
Thomas: The first zeitgeist angle is the ancient law of hospitality, what the Romans called the law of gods and men. You see the concept in the Bible, in ancient China, and in modern Japan. It’s a universal concept about the duties of guests and hosts.
I just finished reading The Odyssey, and the whole book is actually about hospitality. Almost every scene takes place in a home. All the parts that get made into movies are stories Odysseus tells while experiencing hospitality, and the whole interplay in those stories turns on the rules of hospitality. The Cyclops was godless because he didn’t show Odysseus hospitality, not because of who his father was. The book shows the duties of hosts, the duties of guests, and what happens to those who abuse hospitality.
Odysseus, at one point ,declines to compete in games hosted in his honor because he doesn’t want to shame his host. Then you see the suitors abusing hospitality, and what ultimately happens to people who do that.
This concept of hospitality, when you offer it, when you don’t, how you handle someone abusing it, is a civilizational question we need authors to help us navigate. The fact that we’re looking back 2,500 years to the Odyssey for content means there’s a lot of modern territory for you to write about.
What can storytellers and novelists do to help?
Thomas: There’s a growing curiosity about the Crusades, particularly among American Protestants who are realizing they know almost nothing about them, and the few things they think they know are wrong.
There’s a growing view that the Crusades were justified, once people learn that virtually all the places where the Crusades happened were Christian lands that had been conquered by Muslims through rape, pillage, and conquest, with pilgrimages blocked for centuries. After hundreds of years of suffering, the Christians finally said, “We need to get our ancestral lands back.” That triggered the First Crusade.
There’s also growing curiosity about Islam itself, as people realize they don’t know its history. When they hear that Muslims bought more African slaves than Europeans did, they have no idea. They have no idea about the millions of Europeans captured and sold into slavery in the Middle East.
So here is a specific book pitch:
Logline: It’s a medieval Taken.
Pitch: A French knight returns from the Crusade in the Holy Land to find that his teenage daughter has been stolen by Muslim slave traders. Years of warfare have given him a particular set of skills and a determination that nothing will stop him from getting her back.
The plot basically writes itself, and you’ll want to research slave markets and the southern French coast. Getting tagged in certain lists will get you sales. People without courage avoid this kind of controversy. They don’t want to make Muslims the villains even though there’s demand among readers for exactly that, because they’re seeing these migrants raping and pillaging.
The rape report itself connects the acts of these Muslim grooming gangs to specific commands in the Quran. It frames their behavior as an extension of the religion. If you look back over the history of Islam, nothing has changed.
Jonathan: The United States Navy was founded to fight Muslim slave traders. The Navy’s funding was authorized by an act of Congress specifically to fight the Barbary corsairs. That was the first time the Marines met Muslims in combat.
Thomas: The Barbary corsairs had been raiding France and stealing French women, children, and men for generations, and everyone was just paying them protection money. Then Thomas Jefferson came along. His position was “A million dollars for defense before a penny in tribute.” Americans don’t pay tribute to Muslim slave traders. So we sent the Marines to the shores of Tripoli. That’s why it’s in the Marines’ Hymn in the opening stanza, “From the Halls of Montezuma, To the shores of Tripoli.”
Jonathan: Decatur was the captain, and he went with an officer and 10 enlisted Marines plus some Greek mercenaries. They decided to just take Tripoli. They loaded a cannon, fired it, and realized they had fired the ramrod because they forgot to take it out. The Marines looked at each other and said, “Cannon fire’s stopped. Bayonets, I guess.” They fought so violently that they were given the name Leathernecks, for the leather collars they wore to protect against Saracen scimitars. They smoked them.
Thomas: Then they did regime change. In gratitude, the son of the deposed leader gave the Marines a scimitar, which is why the Marine dress sword is a Middle Eastern-style blade. So, we have a history of not negotiating with terrorists. It’s a core American value. The Europeans do not share it. They all paid tribute or the blood tax.
The blood tax is another thing most Americans don’t know about. The Ottoman Empire would conquer Christian lands and require Christians to surrender five- and six-year-old boys from their families. They’d load these boys with drugs and alcohol, brainwash them, forcibly convert them to Islam, and forge them into a military unit known as Janissaries. When the Ottomans invaded Christian lands, the Christian defenders would find themselves fighting and killing their own sons, brothers, and cousins, whom the Ottomans had taken and turned into a radical fighting force.
Jonathan: There’s a great movie on this, Dracula Untold. It’s the story of Vlad the Impaler, and it covers this exact situation. The Ottomans tried to take his son for the blood tax, and he said no.
Has England lost the Mandate of Heaven?
Thomas: There’s been discussion online, particularly on X, about whether England has lost the Mandate of Heaven. This is a cultural sea change you can miss if you’re not paying attention.
As a Christian, I don’t put a lot of stock in omens, but I do acknowledge signs. As Jesus said, it’s a wicked generation that asks for signs, but signs can exist. Supernatural events sometimes manifest in the natural world and signal whether a nation has the favor of God, or what the ancient Chinese would have called the Mandate of Heaven. It’s a universal concept throughout time and cultures: “Does Heaven favor this government?
A lot of people were sharing the photo of the Washington Monument with a rainbow over it and lightning striking nearby, saying America has the Mandate of Heaven. The divine right of kings in English history is essentially the same concept, going back to Emperor Diocletian.
Several events are causing people to question whether England has lost it. First, in 2021, British police killed a rare white stag in the city of Bootle. The white stag is a creature of the other world in Arthurian and Welsh tradition, a symbol of purity and a herald of spiritual quests. It’s the white stag that led the Pevensie children back to England from Narnia. The British police killed it.
Second, the Sycamore Gap tree, the famous tree on Hadrian’s Wall, iconically featured in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, was cut down by vandals.
Third, just days ago, it was officially announced that the Major Oak in Sherwood Forest, a thousand-year-old tree, has died.
Jonathan: That’s like the White Tree of Gondor dying. That’s bad.
Thomas: It’s a thousand-year-old tree that just died. The first omen was police action, the second was vandalism, and the third was supposedly natural causes. A drought, they say. Do you know how many droughts this tree has lived through? It goes back to Robin Hood’s time. It’s older than or contemporary with Magna Carta. Prince John, whom Robin Hood opposed, was eventually forced by the nobles to sign Magna Carta, which is the founding document of the English Constitution. Now that tree, representing a thousand years of English history, has died in Sherwood Forest.
I’m not English, and I’m surprisingly sad about it.
Jonathan: Sometimes God is trying to talk to you. He hears the cries of the innocent and those who cannot defend themselves. When they are crushed by their leaders, by their priests, prophets, kings, and princes, when they are crushed by the mighty and left to foreign invaders, someone is going to come and get their justice.
What can authors do for people who are furious and have no outlet?
Jonathan: When you write your stories, this is something you can incorporate, especially in this fourth-turning moment.
People need an answer to their anger. You heard 250,000 girls were raped and nothing was done. Now you’re angry, but the anger is unanswered. There’s no satisfactory conclusion, which means it festers, and that produces terrible results. That’s why justice matters. It must resolve the feeling of anger.
In our stories, we can create events that generate this kind of anger. We can write those events. And because readers are already feeling that anger, when they encounter it on the page and then get the satisfaction of seeing justice prevail, it works.
Think about John Wick. You remember how furious you were when they killed his puppy? My wife still gets mad. She doesn’t even like those movies, but she asks, “Can he kill them again?” In The Patriot, the villain kept killing his sons, and my mom was saying, “Stab him again!” She was upset by the way the villain died because she wanted more.
Thomas: It’s catharsis. When you see justice done in a story, you feel satisfied, which is what people cannot get in the real UK right now. As an author, you can give them that feeling narratively. As an American author, there’s very little you can do in the streets of Britain, but you can guide people narratively, and there’s real power in that.
There’s a movie going viral on X right now, called Reign of Fire. People are realizing it’s a near-perfect metaphor for the situation the UK is in. In the film, the UK becomes infested with dragons that spread across the whole Earth and create a dragon apocalypse. Eventually, the United States sends armed military to Britain, where the survivors are hiding in holes and mountains and castles, and the Americans say, “You don’t have to live tormented by the dragons. You don’t have to hide from them. We have this thing in America called killing dragons, and we are going to kill dragons here.”
Jonathan: The initial reaction of all the British was to get into the castle and hide. Then the Americans showed up, flew above the dragon, and jumped out of the aircraft with net guns to bring it down so they could shoot it. It’s tactically insane, and totally cool.
Thomas: You have to suspend disbelief about how helicopters magically flew across the Atlantic. But “Gondor calls for aid” is the energy. Watch Reign of Fire, because that movie is narratively resonating right now, and you can write books along those lines. You can give people hope and guide them, because in turbulent times, it’s easy for people to overreact and do things they regret.
Telling angry people they shouldn’t be angry when they have cause to be angry doesn’t work.
Jonathan: Don’t tell people to calm down. Have you ever told a woman to calm down? Learn from your pain. You have to satisfy the grievance. You have to treat the wound.
Thomas: In times like this, we need authors who can step back from the news, think about core issues, core philosophies, core identities and strategies, and work them into a narrative that helps people make sense of the pain they feel.
Jonathan: If you have the gift of words and you know what’s going on, you are duty-bound to use it. “To him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin.”
If you are not doing this, you have a problem. That’s my extremist view on this.
Thomas: Use your power for good as a writer. The pen is mightier than the sword. You don’t have a sword, but you have a pen. Use it.
