Instituting Integrity: The rise of the integrity worker collective

Today I’m sitting down with Talha Baig to talk about a new to me organization, the Integrity Institute. On the show, I’ve spent a lot of time talking about what I see as a new workforce emerging in the tech sector, of people working in jobs in the tech sector to try and understand, assess, and mitigate some of the harms caused by technologies. That’s why I was excited to learn about the Integrity Institute, a cohort of engineers, product managers, researchers, analysts, data scientists, operations specialists, policy experts and more, who are coming together to leverage their combined experience and their understanding of the systemic causes of problems on the social internet to help mitigate these problems. They want to bring this experience and expertise directly to the people theorizing, building, and governing the social internet. So I wanted to talk to Talha, who hosts the Trust in Tech podcast out of the institute, about the concept, the function, and the future of integrity work.

Talha Baig is an expert on using machine learning to address platform integrity issues. He has spent 3 years as a Machine Learning Engineer reducing human, drugs, and weapon trafficking on Facebook Marketplace. He has insider knowledge on how platforms use AI for both good and bad, and shares his thoughts on his new podcast Trust in Tech, where he has in-depth conversations about the social internet with other platform integrity workers. They discuss the intersections between internet, society, culture, and philosophy with the goal of helping individuals, societies, and democracies to thrive.