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Comment by JoshTko | Hacker News Reader

The avg. American reads at a middle school level. Many read at an elementary school level, meaning ~1/4 of America will take this video as fact. Couple this with an algorithm that will only feed you things you like and you have a recipe for disaster. 100% unrestricted freedom of speech only works with a highly educated populate which America does not have.

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Educated people are more easy to brainwash actually. They’ll believe anything the establishment tells them because they spend more time in school following directions and going “by the book” - they excel at this.

Less educated people need to learn to trust their instincts, and be skeptical at all times.

Politics is about really simple stuff because you can’t over complicate at such a high level of abstraction.

I think there is no relationship whatsoever between education level and common sense. If anything the correlation is negative. Highly educated people don’t need common sense because they deal with complex things.

You speak with such authority on these matters. You clearly must have sources and relevant studies to back your claims. Especially given the subject matter; it’d be quite ironic otherwise. So please do share your sources…

  > They’ll believe anything the establishment tells them because 
  > they spend more time in school following directions and going 
  > “by the book” - they excel at this.

Grade A satire. I, of course, have yet to meet anyone with an advanced degree who trusted "the book," as such naivete is the surest route to frustration. Critically evaluating received wisdom is essential to surviving grad school... As is learning to play politics to satisfy the hidebound whilst pursuing your own goals.

Yes only free speech for the 'intelligent.'. I wonder what you might be a bit ignorant about in future that would require restricting your participation...

Amazing how many people support tyranny by thinking they are on the side of righteousness.

Everyone has rights, or no one has rights. Remember that

Sounds like the solution is better education, not censorship.

Totally, but only one of those things is within YouTube’s power. There are all kinds of decisions to make where “what do we do to mitigate this now” looks different from “what’s the ideal place we want to be?”

Definitely a good idea to let corporate social media behemoths decide what is acceptable speech. What could possibly go wrong?

Is it not? I'm sure this would be very difficult to get right, but I've often wondered why there isn't more innovation in the direction of not censorship but rather "gating" behind proof of knowledge. What I mean is, what if there were a series of questions presented to the viewer before they could consume this kind of content? This could act as a way to deter folks from mindlessly viewing the video but also as an educational tool. For this kind of political video, you could ask relevant questions from eg the US citizenship test [0].

[0] https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/questions...

So sneaky censorship instead then?

Or you could just present people with the data and let them make up their own minds. We have to stop thinking we're on the 'right' side and it's ok to silence the 'wrong.'

Think about this, if the controls or restrictions you discuss were available to the opposition tomorrow, would you still support them?

Why do they need to "mitigate" anything?

Politics has been rife with BS and lies forever. This isn't a one-off, they've been doing this for years and only in a certain direction. Not un-coincidentally, it's in the opposite direction of their employees' political views which are 95 D for Microsoft to 99% D at Google. (The whole range of big tech companies' political affiliations is within this range, which is actually more partisan than D voters themselves.)

The practical effect of this, and it may be hard to see this coming from an environment where literally 99% of the people who surround you think the same way, is for people to permanently form strong opinions against you. It's already happened in America because of 2020, which is why monopoly break ups are now a highly likely proposition, but coming from a different end of the spectrum.

It has always amazed me the vitriol that tech companies have for people they do not understand or care to.

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