Some Reddit employees certainly can see message content. This shows up in /r/redditrequest . Some times the system will flag a request for manual review. In that case, the following message is in the request:

> Thanks for submitting this request! It’s been flagged for manual review (not a bad thing!). This might delay a decision by a couple weeks. In the meantime, please politely message the moderators of r/whatever and reply to this comment with a link to that message. Only you, the mods of r/whatever, and some admins will be able to view the message content. Including a link to this message will help speed the process along.

Yes, that's right.