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This youtube video The Worst Job at Google - The Human Filter; claims that Google hire people to inspect content, and determine if they contain illegal contents.

It is based on a 2012 Buzzfeed story.

His role at the tech company mainly consisted of reviewing things like bestiality, necrophilia, body mutilations (gore, shock, beheadings, suicides), explicit fetishes (like diaper porn) and child pornography found across all Google products — an experience that he found “scarring.”

So does Google hire people to do the job manually?

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  • Just curious what do you want to verify here? There are so many claims given in that video that it is hard to find which one do you care about. Does google hire people to do some manual job? (sure they do). Do these people sit 8 hours per day watching killings and pornography? By the way if you will install tor and try to access onion domains, you would be disappointed to find how little killing/decapitation and other claimed in the video stuff will you be able to find. Most probably this is just another clickbait
    – Salvador Dali
    Oct 14, 2016 at 0:54
  • @SalvadorDali yes the claim that they sit all day watching illegal content is what bother me the most
    – Lynob
    Oct 14, 2016 at 5:18
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    When people flag for instance a YouTube video as porn I guess somewhere, sometime an actual human have to check it.
    – liftarn
    Oct 14, 2016 at 7:17
  • @SVilcans I guess not most of the times since YouTube removed ads@ from videos that conflict with their term of service recently so they were able to automate it I guess + fb cares about the number of reporte and very rarely checks manually. But even if YouTube checks manually, there's a difference between checking YouTube and surfing the web looking for bad content all day long to censor it as claimed by that video
    – Lynob
    Oct 14, 2016 at 8:03
  • @Lynob: You'll note that I edited back the claim to match what the Buzzfeed story said, and that has now been confirmed by the answer. No-one claims they search for stuff to censor. Instead, automated systems and users flag content that needs checking, and where, there is doubt, human moderators adjudicate. Don't think "Google Search". Think Google's content, like YouTube, Maps, Orkut, etc.
    – Oddthinking ♦
    Oct 27, 2016 at 14:36

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Yes, they do hire people to filter content.

I wasn't aware that this information could be considered controversial. It's not really a secret, it's called Commercial Content Moderation and most big companies who work with user content do it.

For the sake of giving a source, a paper published on the Western University Portal:

Commercial Content Moderation: Digital Laborers' Dirty Work (PDF)

Conclusion:

The hidden labor of CCM workers is a critical component to the curation and creation of social media sites and the content they disseminate. CCM workers view and deal with material that is racist, homophobic, sexist, and disturbing as a regular part of their daily work. In many cases, content of this type does not just end up on a site without any intervention; when it has been reviewed and deemed fit to post, it is, in essence, curated.

This article from a German news portal claims that 150,000 people work in Commercial Content Moderation in the Philippines alone.

Die digitale Müllabfuhr: Kommerzielle Inhaltsmoderation auf den Philippinen

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