Benjamin Franklin's Ratio
Post #1109
John Beaudoin recently came out with a plan to ally various factions of freedom-lovers against government encroachment into civil liberties, and reference #5 at the end of the report takes you to an interview/discussion with Mark Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan’s show. In the discussion, Zuckerberg talks about where to set the censorship settings.
If you set them too high, then you don’t catch many of the violators. If you set them too low, then you end up punishing a large volume (many thousands) of innocent people who should never have had their account suspended in the first place.
To help Zuckerberg in choosing where to set the standard, Benjamin Franklin’s wisdom is advised:
[click to enlarge]
At bottom, Ben Franklin relays how it would be better if 100 guilty parties escaped justice, than it would be if just one innocent person is wrongly convicted of a crime they did not commit. FaceBook/Meta has had a setting that was set too low, leading to many thousands of people who lost access to their accounts for no good reason.
It would be better if Zuckerberg swings the pendulum back the other way, creating a threshold that is so high that it lets over 100 violators off of the hook for every innocent person that gets locked out of their account, or has their account suspended for a time.
Example
Let’s say that you run a school and after recess in the playground, you find evidence that bullying went on. You set the level of evidence for bullying such that anyone with their clothes disheveled gets sent to detention for the rest of the day, being suspected of engaging in the kind of rough-housing associated with school-yard bullying.
But your policy will also send some innocent kids to detention, because some kids merely play rough with one another, but without actual bullying. Upon follow-up, it is discovered that at least one half of those sent to detention were innocent kids, wrongly convicted of bullying.
That’s a “bad policy” (it convicts the innocent much too much).
In order to develop a “good policy” you begin to require a higher benchmark level of evidence, before you send kids to detention. Having a shirt pulled out, or whatever, is no longer enough to get sent to detention — but rough-housing evidence must also be supplemented with the eye-witness testimony of at least two kids that bullying occurred.
Zuckerberg should not be inadvertently suspending the accounts of many thousands of people, because it is “un-American.” In Communist nations — which are by-definition un-American — the opposite thing has been argued for.
The horrific Communist leader of Cambodia, Pol Pot, claimed that it would be better if 10 innocents got punished than if one guilty party escaped punishment. To understand the injustice of living under such a tainted moral worldview, just take a look at the national death rate in Cambodia when someone as evil as Pol Pot was in charge:
With over 80 deaths per 1,000 people, that means that more than 8% of the entire population was dying (each year) in those years.
Zuckerberg talked about how it is that the U.S. government should be leading the way in not going after tech companies to pressure them to censor Americans, arguing that America is a type of beacon of freedom and hope for the world — and when the U.S. government did it, it granted a free pass for European nations to follow the lead.
But then Facebook/Meta should not be acting like Communists do — harming several innocents, just to get at a single guilty party — but should instead adopt American ideals of justice and protection of the innocent. If Zuckerberg admits that the American way is a better way, then those words should be backed up by actions.
This means setting the threshold for censorship very high, so high that it only very rarely ever leads to an innocent person with their account getting suspended. More bad guys get away when you do that, but it is morally correct because the welfare of good guys is more important than the welfare of bad guys.
When being good does not prevent you from harm, then the incentive for good falls. It is crucial for the continued existence of humanity that the incentive for good doesn’t fall. Therefore, “not harming good people” should be the top priority of any public policy, even if it means that more bad guys get away (for now).
Reference
[Ben Franklin espoused American ideals of justice and protection of the innocent] — https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-43-02-0335
[Pol Pot espoused the Communist ideal of harming several innocent people, just to make sure that a guilty party doesn’t go unpunished] — Moulin Xiong, Richard G. Greenleaf, Jona Goldschmidt, Citizen attitudes toward errors in criminal justice: Implications of the declining acceptance of Blackstone's ratio, International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice, Volume 48, 2017, Pages 14-26, ISSN 1756-0616, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijlcj.2016.10.001.
[Cambodia’s death rate under Pol Pot set a world record of over 8% per year] — https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/crude-death-rate?tab=chart&country=KHM