Trust in Tech, Episode 7: XCheck — Policing the Elite of Facebook Users

Welcome to the Trust in Tech podcast, a project by the Integrity Institute — a community driven think tank which advances the theory and practice of protecting the social internet, powered by our community of integrity professionals.

In this episode, Integrity Institute member Lauren Wagner and fellow Karan Lala discuss Meta’s cross-check program and the Oversight Board’s policy advisory opinion. They cover how Meta treats its most influential and important users, the history and technical details of the cross-check program, the public response to its leak, what the Oversight Board found with respect to Meta’s scaled content moderation, and what the company could do to address its gaps going forward. 

Lauren Wagner is a venture capitalist and fellow at the Berggruen Institute researching trust and safety. She previously worked at Meta, where she developed product strategy to tackle misinformation at scale and built privacy-protected data sharing products. Karan Lala is currently a J.D. Candidate at the University of Chicago Law School working at the intersection of policy and technology. He was a software engineer on Facebook’s Civic Integrity team, where he led efforts to detect and enforce against abusive assets and sensitive entities in the civic space.

Timestamps:

0:00: Intro

1:36: Overview of the XCheck program

7:53: Data-sharing with the Oversight Board

11:01: XCheck around the world

12:59: The Oversight Board’s findings

19:25: Public response to the leak

22:40: Recommendations and fixes 

34:02: What should the future of XCheck look like?

Credits:

Trust in Tech is hosted by Alice Hunsberger, and produced by Talha Baig.

Edited by Alice Hunsberger.

Music by Zhao Shen. 

Special thanks to Sahar Massachi, Cass Marketos, Rachel Fagen and Sean Wang.