Once upon a time, writers were able to write for online publications and actually make some decent money. Then the corporations got involved and choked off the cash flows to increase shareholder profits. The technologies have become better with regard to a form of online censorship we call shadow banning.

These tech companies have increasingly learned to adjust their platforms algorithms to push written articles with certain SEO and key words in them to the back of the search engines, effectively making them invisible to people searching for certain subjects to read about.

I've been dealing with this for a couple of years now but it has never concerned me as I never intended to make any money off of my online articles. I only made a little over $10 last year in gross earnings for my podcast articles in Medium.com and zero dollars from my Substack platform.

I only had one donation from a friend in this website all of last year. I think he felt obligated to support me a little bit due to all of our online collaborations together last year and the year before. If you're reading this, thank you for your support. I won't name names as that would be rude.

Back to my friend in England. He recently wrote an open letter to the Medium.com managers about the loss of income he has had since the site went corporate, and the loss of several good writers. All of whom had depended on incomes generated by writing good articles for this publication.

Those days are gone now. Especially if you write anything with the words Palestine, Hamas, Hezbollah, and now, Iran, in the articles. As my friend said, he went looking for an old article intending to reference it for a new piece, and it had disappeared. Gone, vanished, poof, no more.

I haven't looked at my que in Medium lately and now, I'm a little afraid of what I won't find.

I wrote and recorded a podcast last week all about the war in Gaza and the Palestinians. Now I'm wondering if it's still in my listings. I should go look. Not that I really care but I'm curious now.

This is the new world we find ourselves in. Increasingly online and at the mercy of the platform owners and moderators. I'm all about moderating hate speech and extreme violent rhetoric. That only encourages some people to act these things out in real life. There's enough of that caused by our rogue governments.

What we don't need, is the censorship of speech, that has no violent rhetoric in it, that falls under normal conditions in the U.S. considered free speech under the first amendment.

Unfortunately, in the United States and Europe, political writers are being actively censored using software coding to restrict or choke off altogether, written speech about the war in Gaza, the West Bank or any criticism of Israel. Even short form videos such as the ones uploaded to Tik Tok or Instagram are being targeted for restrictions due to content that the Israelis and their vassals deem anti-Semitic.

Free speech is becoming something from the past. It's largely coming under attack anymore by these wealthy tech tycoons and politicians who want to find favour with the Israelis and Trump's government.

This speech restriction in the U.S. and Europe ramped up hard right after October 7th, 2023 when Hamas and some Palestinian militias broke through and attacked a bunch of Israelis at a nearby music festival. A lot of people died that day on both sides and even more have died since. More than 75,000 Palestinians by a loose count and no one truly knows the number of IDF soldiers killed in the ongoing war so far. Israel is censoring everything coming out of there these days.

Not that there wasn't some free speech restrictions starting up before that, but it really took off after October 7th.

I usually get at least a few acknowledgements that people have read or listened to the podcast embedded in each post once a week, but my podcast and written portion from last week have received nothing so far, as if the mere mention of Palestine and the war automatically triggered the censorship algorithms.

I don't have to worry about that here. The Americans and Israelis can point fingers at my articles and podcasts about Israel and Palestine all day long but they can't choke them off and make them invisible to readers, like they're doing to the U.S. based platforms.

I feel bad for my friends who used to be able to depend on the extra income generated by their writings on these online platforms. I don't know how they're managing with the loss. As I mentioned, since I never made more than the price of a fancy cup of coffee at a Starbucks with my writings, I'm not missing anything.

Here on Crann na beatha, I don't have to worry about any censorship, as long as I, or anyone else, doesn't write about fomenting a violent rebellion or try to incite violence somewhere.

Which brings me to my last point. I have the ability to post other peoples blog articles here, should someone be interested. The problem I have, is that this blog platform is pretty much invisible. Despite all of my attempts to draw attention to it, I am only able to draw in one of my dearest friends to read these posts, and even that is pretty sporadic. I want to do more.

I want to offer other writers to contribute here. It's an idea I came up with just today. The trouble is, there's no financial incentive. I'm just a comfortable pensioner with no money to pay for someone's articles, should they want to post something. I most certainly don't have any financial sponsors. I'm not even sure I would want one unless they really like my Irish flavour. So what to do?

I think this will remain an idea for now until I talk to some friends. Who knows, maybe some readers may find some other voices here someday in the future. I just have to figure out how to make it worth their while.

In other news, it snowed here in central Virginia today. The results of another polar vortex forecast last week. We're all experiencing weird weather these days due to climate warming so we should start getting used to weird weather from now on. With everything I'm seeing around me here, I'm pretty sure we're going to have a very hot summer ahead.

With everything else going on, the solar panels on my roof may come in very handy to help pay for the extra electricity I may need to keep us from having heat stroke this year. I feel sorry for all of the people who won't have that advantage.

This war in Iran has the real potential to bring down the world's economies if it isn't stopped very soon. I won't talk about it here very much, other than to say that this is going to have a huge affect on regular people just trying to keep a roof over their heads and a decent amount of food on their tables. The amount of food insecure people in the U.S. is in the tens of millions now, according to something I read today. Imagine this getting much worse as this conflict carries on?

That's all that's on my mind this week as we continue to watch the world come apart due to a very weak U.S. president who gets led around by his nose by anyone who looks like they're a tough guy.

Stay safe everyone. Sláinte