Google tells army of 'quality raters' to flag Holocaust denial

10,000 contractors told to flag 'upsetting-offensive' content after months of criticism over hate speech, misinformation and fake news in search results

Google is using a 10,000-strong army of independent contractors to flag "offensive or upsetting" content, in order to ensure that queries like "did the Holocaust happen" don't push users to misinformation, propaganda and hate speech.

The review of search terms is being done by the company's "quality raters", a little-known corps of worldwide contractors that Google uses to assess the quality of its systems. The raters are given searches based on real queries to conduct, and are asked to score the results on whether they meet the needs of users.