Week in Review: June 29, 2016

Ukrainian Writer Whose Novel Debuts on Facebook Has Work Translated to English Ukrainian writer Oleh Shynkarenko’s book Kaharlyk , about a dystopian Ukrainian society inspired by the Maidan square protests in 2014, is now available in English . The book got its start in a written space not usually known to be literary; Shynkarenko wrote snippets of his book to share on Facebook. Shynkarenko turned to Facebook after sharing his writing on a blog in 2010, but when he joked about hoping there were radicals that could kill the then-president of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych, he encountered trouble. The young writer was interrogated by security services and subsequently found his own blog to have been deleted. The newly translated story follows a protagonist experiencing the hardships of a Russian-controlled Ukrainian society. In this futuristic and oppressive society , the protagonist loses his memory because the Russian army uses his brain to control satellites. Shynkarenko hopes that his writing makes the reader reflect on the dangers of increased Russian influence in Ukraine. In Shynkarenko’s case, Index on Censorship editor Rachel Jolley shares that “Facebook was a freer space and less open to the vagaries of the authorities” than traditional blogging websites.

Social Media Platforms Get Serious About Censoring Terrorist Content After many social media platforms have received demands from the US government to disrupt how ISIS recruits from abroad, Google and Facebook are stepping up their game. Reuters reports that the two social media giants are making the removal of extremist videos from their websites automated. This follows an announcement that researchers at Dartmouth College have adjusted a new detection tool for these purposes. The technology used to automatically remove terrorist video content is the same technology used to protect against copyright infringement on the web, a process known as “hashing.”   The Week in Review explained this method last week, but as a reminder, the technology involves taking a long stream of data of arbitrary length and assigning it to a specific value of a fixed length, which is known as a hash. Similar files will be given the same hash, which allows computers to quickly and easily spot duplicates. It is not clear how extremist videos are identified to begin with - some videos with terrorist content are reported by users, but according to the MIT Technology Review it’s not known much human effort on the part of Google or Facebook is exerted to locate these videos. This is a big move in the direction of gutting the internet of terrorist related content, but politicians are hoping that tech companies can soon use user data to identify potential terrorists and potential threats.

Gun Control Advocates on Facebook Report a Florida Congressman’s Gun RaffleAfter years of being an unintentional marketplace for gun sales, in January Facebook banned the private sale of guns and ammunition. But Facebook is having trouble enforcing the ban. Florida Senator Greg Evers wrote a post on his Facebook page stating that he would raffle off an AR-15 to any Facebook user who had “liked” his page. Facebook decided to remove two