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Comment by terminaljunkid | Hacker News Reader

> I am not sure if India is ready to deal with unchecked free flow of information

Fellow Indian, 100% agreed. Most of people who told me Wikipedia was unreliable now trust random WhatsApp forward messages.

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But this is just stupidity. Does exist also a lot in the western world, but I don't see, how that can improved with restricting information flow?

Yup, there is no magic potion for imparting critical thinking. If anybody thinks Indians are the only ones affected by misinformation, please go to the Twitter feed of the current president of the United states, and read the replies.

I totally agree that misinformation is everywhere but I still think there's a huge difference in just how impactful/dangerous misinformation can be in countries like india vs the US.

I'm not indian, but a very similar pattern of a sudden explosion in internet access happened in Morocco, where I'm from. Morocco has a relatively large population of uneducated or barely educated young people that are super active on the internet and to be honest, the results are just horrible. Especially since majority of them are unemployed (which isn't their fault, the job market there is just horrible) and have nothing else to do anyways. And what happened to the two danish girls murdered there imo is directly related to that mix of totally ignorant people with total access to information they can barely process that end up radicalized

Misinformation has a huge impact everywhere, and I don't see how other companies are more immune to it. With the president of the US claiming climate change is a hoax, invented by the Chinese, and Boris Johnson, the current PM of England, saying NHS will get so much money back on leaving the EU, these countries sure don't look immune. Mind you, these are not trivial lies, these are lies believed by a huge number of their followers. And both of the above people ended up winning elections.

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