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In this day and age where things can be so easily (well, it's more feasible to say the least) faked, how can people know if this is legitimate or not?

I'd love someone with more knowledge in this area to weigh in.

Reputation and details. The poster just joined youtube today. If this were fraud, wouldn't you tell friends, and wouldn't one of those friends already have a youtube account? Where was this? Why isn't that specific information included?
Same video, very few comments or upvotes yet:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4748783

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4748736

HN should detect duplicates on submit.
They do when they're identical. Unfortunately, all these links are subtly different.

    When someone says "I want a programming language
    in which I need only say what I wish done," give
    him a lollipop.

        -- Alan Perlis ACM-SIGPLAN '82,
           Epigrams in Programming
I invite you to suggest a solution to the problem of duplicated content.
No something changed, I have seen several links I and others have submitted from tech sites duplicated, they are 100% identical.

Example:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4749228

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4749070

Same exact title, same exact link.

I can't check, because one of them has been deleted, but I know that there are rare occasions when this happens. I also know that most of the time when a duplicate link is submitted it acts as an upvote on the existing item.

I also know that this doesn't work unless the earlier item is in the cache.

I also know that the duplicate detection mechanism is currently working because I just tripped it, so it's either more complicated than you think, or I haven't understood you fully.

HN does (usually) detect exact duplicates, and your comment seems a bit simplistic. The duplications of these videos about the voting machines are not identical URLs, and I haven't recently seen an example where the URL was identical, and yet was not detected. As I say, your references can't be checked because one has been deleted, but I have several times seen people claim a duplicate was not detected, only the find that the URLs were not, in fact, completely identical.

I am unconvinced that anything has changed.

Here is another duplicate of the same story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4749252

Simplistic, but exact matches none-the-less.

Nope, not exact duplicates, because one has a trailing backslash, the other doesn't. Sometimes that matters.
The largest discussion has ended up here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4749574