They could just flag the accounts of educational institutions as educational. I sincerely doubt the Cornell University Library is going to pivot to pornography.
I wish that regulation was the answer, but back in the day, government censorship was the problem. Which also fell disproportionately on small and weak organizations. In the 80s and 90s, in Canada, there were Supreme Court cases about small LGBT-identified bookstores routinely having their orders seized by Customs on obscenity grounds.
EDIT: I don’t know what I believe any more. We know that censorship falls heavily on on unpopular speech from marginalized people, no matter whether it’s government or private industry. On the other hand, without censorship or regulation, it seems to be true that content providers and adtech will turn about 10-15% of the population insane with far-right conspiracy theories.
But the tension between free speech, censorship, information, and misinformation is as old as communication itself, and there's more to be learned on the subjects from history than from the YouTube Terms of Service.
I have some of these people in my family tree. Adtech, content providers, censorship, etc are all irrelevant. Those 10-15% are going to find their nutjob content no matter where it lives. The content doesn't make them crazy, they make themselves crazy by filtering their memetic exposure to stuff that confirms their biases. Kicking it off of youtube does not prevent them from finding it, it just confirms their suspicion that there's a conspiracy trying to stop them from hearing "the truth".
IIUC you're suggesting people -- academic lecturers, no less, not professional streamers -- splice out sections of their lecture, replace them with a content warning, provide a contextual link to the "risky" content, and then hope that people will follow it, jump right back to the original lecture, and then come back? (And that somehow that link won't trigger the same YouTube content flag, b/c obviously they're going to at least broadly categorize outbound links to combat spam.)
This (meaning HN) community regularly nerds out over SEO, landing page optimization, and zero-friction payment flows. Why should we expect educators to be successful delivering complex content in an approachable way if we're also going to require them to carefully slice their content into "acceptable" and "NSFW" segments and deliver them separately, even when the original lecture was linear?
But how hard can it be to mark Cornell University as an account important enough that every action needs a human review, or two?
The love for tech companies on Wall Street stems from their ability to scale up revenues much more rapidly than their costs. Human review is costly, and at YouTube's scale, every reasonable request for more human attention opens the floodgates for tons of other, equally reasonable requests. Thus, any broad policy change that increases demand for human review can eat into profit margins and stock prices big time, and will therefore be resisted with great ferocity and vigilance.
Probably not but what rando has the password to that account could be crazy wide ranging, that's the real key. Professional sports teams still have run ins with "oh some rando intern was posting sorry".
Still worth a try. Maybe have it so the filter "flags" questionable video, the account is special so it doesn't remove the video and it gets checked "quickly" with some identifier that this is an educational account.
Granted exceptions are always complicated. What happens when someone else gets their content shut down and a concerned educational account starts reposing it ;) (and that's just the first complication I can think of)
Vimeo seems like a much better fit for eduction to be honest. They're probably more expensive, though.
What they really want is to upload the Internet Archive, but the UI really sucks.
To the credit of YT, they host plenty of nude videos that aren't, somehow, "porn" (search for "Brazilian wax" for instance...)
So much so that one begins to wonder if the problem with Cornell and such may stem more from the political message than the imagery itself.
[0] As in it will leave a bad impression on a lot of people, not that they'll lose the next election.