Rather than letting YouTube users pick the question, a very World Wide Webby thing to do, CNN is still insisting that it needs to filter the questions to avoid controversy. But techPresident disagrees and is citing a spreadsheet of the YouTube community's response to all 4,927 submissions to make its case.

The spreadsheet lists the videos by views, favorites, ratings, comments, honors and links. TechPresident focused on the 40 that were viewed the most.

"And guess what we discovered?" Josh Levy wrote. "No cyborgs! No snowmen! Only two of the top 40 videos stick out as possibly too weird to show the candidates. ... In fact, that vast majority of these top videos ask important, cross-partisan questions.'

We'll know tonight how that filter compares with the one chosen by CNN -- namely, debate moderator Anderson Cooper, CNN Washington bureau chief David Bohrman and two or three other network staffers.