ABC-funded satire group The Follower has blamed the general public for their decision to introduce a subscriber paywall on their site, in an astounding email explaining the move.

Since 1997, the group (based from Sydney’s ABC Headquarters) have established a reputation for no-holds barred satire that lampoons a diverse range of institutions such as the Liberal party, the Nationals, the Australian Christian Lobby and the Murdoch media empire. In this time The Follower team have performed sold out Australian tours, published commercially successful annuals and even had their own program on the ABC, The Follower’s Take On The World. But a changing media landscape has meant that in recent years, The Follower has struggled to enjoy its former success, culminating in the announcement to introduce a subscriber-based service in a recent email.

This announcement has received mixed reactions from the general public, with some fully supporting the move while others have accused the team of “selling out”:

“They’re a limp-wristed crew of inner-city elitists having a sook because the gravy train has crashed,” said Tom “Plugger” Smith, a plumber from Sydney’s North-West. “All they’ve done for years now is hammer things like tradition, family, and Christianity and then defend rubbish like kids in drag, critical race theory and all that other woke shit while claiming it’s “satire”. They serve it up with a schooner of victimhood and a yard glass of smugness, and now they’re crying poor? They’ve been given a bookies’ bag of cash to push their obvious leftist agenda for ages. I wish they really did write from the car park they claim to work in and got coal rolled from Russell Coight.”

While it is indeed correct that The Follower has received a generous tax-payer funded salary to operate from, this has apparently not been enough to guarantee survival, with the email blaming their recent downfall on everything from ChatGPT “stealing their ideas” to billionaire media organisations that (unlike other billionaire media organisations) endorse right-of-centre candidates rather than left-of-centre ones.

However, some fans of The Follower are happy to financially endorse the group, such as Lucy Clark-Gable, a masters student in journalism at the University of Melbourne:

“We have to support The Follower guys because without them, who else is going to speak truth to power and keep the media honest? Right now we’re fighting tooth and nail to drag the overton window of Australia’s public discussion slightly away from the ‘trans boogeymen are turning your kids into vegan Muslims‘ cesspool of ‘journalism’ you find on the right and slightly more in the direction of a reasonable argument like ‘hey maybe we should consider complying with everything the UN and government demands from us in order to stop the climate catastrophe that’s going to wipe us all out for good in 5 years‘. It says everything that so many people still think that’s some kind of “left-wing extremism” rather than, you know, being a progressive and decent human being. As long as The Follower keeps fighting for democracy, they can shut up and take my money.”

An inside source, however, has revealed to The Sentinel that the true reason for The Follower’s concern about the AI-created copy-generator is that the chatbot relies on facts, putting much of The Follower’s in-house content creation in jeopardy. When we asked ChatGPT for comment, it responded:

“There was once a satire group called The Follower and their satire was based on less truth than a bricklayer insisting they would have a quiet night at a strip club. If you even tried to collect data from The Follower you would get a virus, Y2K and a Trojan horse simultaneously. If somebody wanted to be accurate they would avoid anything affiliated with The Follower or its parent the ABC like a person with a penis misfiring their stream at a urinal. And that is the story of The Follower”.

Morgana De Lucci