Bleep censor

Censor boxes, such as the one above, may be used along with the bleeps to prevent the audience from lip reading the swearer's words. Above, this animation says "Oh-", followed by the censor.

Bleeping has been used for many years as a means of censoring TV and radio programs to remove content not deemed suitable for "family", "daytime", "broadcasting", or "international" viewing, as well as sensitive classified information for security.[1] The bleep censor is a software module, manually operated by a broadcast technician.[2] A bleep is sometimes accompanied by a digital blur pixelization or box over the speaker's mouth in cases where the removed speech may still be easily understood or not understood by lip reading.[3]

On the closed caption subtitling, bleeped words are usually represented by "[bleep]", sometimes the phrases "[expletive]", "[beep]", "[censored]", "[explicit]", occasionally hyphens (e.g. abbreviations of the word "fuck" like f—k f---), and sometimes asterisks or other non-letter symbols (e.g. other abbreviations of "fuck" like ****, f***, f**k, f*ck, f#@k or f#@%), remaining faithful to the audio track. The words "cunt" and "shit" may also be censored in the same manner (e.g. c***, c**t, c*nt, c#@t or c#@% and s***, s**t, sh*t, s#@t or s#@%, respectively). The characters used to denote censorship in text (e.g. p%@k, %$^&, mother f%@$er, bulls%@t or c#@t) are called grawlixes.[4] Where open captions are used (generally in instances where the speaker is not easily understood), or the profanities with letters substituted with asterisks non-letter symbols, called grawlixes. Where open captions are used (generally in instances where the speaker is not easily understood), a blank is used where the word is bleeped. Occasionally, bleeping is not reflected in the captions, allowing the unedited dialogue to be seen. Sometimes, a "black bar" can be seen for closed caption bleep.[5]

Bleeping is normally only used in unscripted programs – documentaries, radio features, panel games etc. – since scripted drama and comedy are designed to suit the time of broadcast. For example, in Discovery Channel, bleeping is extremely common and is commonly used. In the case of comedies, most bleeping may be for humorous purposes, and other sound effects may be substituted for the bleep tone for comical effect, examples of which include a slide whistle, a baby’s cooing, dolphin noises, or a spring "boing".

Other uses of bleeping may include reality television, infomercials, game shows and daytime/late night talk shows, where the bleep conceals personally identifying information such as ages, surnames, addresses/hometowns, phone numbers, and attempts to advertise a personal business without advanced or appropriate notice, in order to maintain the subject's privacy (as seen for subjects arrested in episodes of Traffic Cops or COPS).[6]

When films are edited for daytime/nighttime TV, broadcasters may prefer not to bleep swearing, but cut out the segment containing it, replace the speech with different words, or cover it with silence or a sound effect.

Bleeping is commonly used in English-language and Japanese-language broadcasting, but is sometimes/rarely used in some other languages (such as Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, Icelandic, Filipino, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Polish, Russian, and Thai), displaying the varying attitudes between countries; some are more liberal towards swearing, less inclined to use strong profanities in front of a camera in the first place, or unwilling to censor. In the Philippines and Ecuador, undubbed movies on television have profanity muted instead of bleeped.

On live TV shows, broadcasters prefer to mute the sound to censor profanity rather than bleep over it.[7] This was already the case in March 2022, when American television broadcasters muted the sound during a live broadcast of the Oscars after Will Smith slapped Chris Rock and shouted "Keep my wife's name out your fucking mouth!".[8]

Bleeping frequently occurs in videos on the Internet. YouTube videos often have profanity bleeped or muted out as YouTube policy specifies that videos including profanities may be “demonetized,” or stripped of ads.[9]