Here's the citation, from the Official YouTube Blog:

"We will continue the significant growth of our teams into next year, with the goal of bringing the total number of people across Google working to address content that might violate our policies to over 10,000 in 2018."

https://youtube.googleblog.com/2017/12/expanding-our-work-ag...

Contractor, like Call center employees. Probably from outsourcing firms. And, this number seems...low? Considering the sheer amount of videos upload even just from partners.

I guess those platforms are growing so large and influential, censoring is inevitable now.

Casually calling contractors employees to the press seems like a decent way to open yourself up to a employment status lawsuits.

The "employee" word is not mentioned in Google's post a single time.

This article made the round years ago and claims there were already 100,000 distributed across the world employed by Google, Facebook and other social networks. https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/

"Google told partners that it plans to use both human moderators -- the company recently announced it will have 10,000 employees focused on the task -- as well as artificial intelligence software to flag videos deemed inappropriate for ads."

They will record decisions people make as training examples and will use it to train ML models.

Maybe most of them are not exactly google full time employees?

I would speculate most of these employees are outsourced workers from countries like the Philippines (see for a recent discussion of this: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/comme...)

Mechanical Turk.