Bleep 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.
[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 by lip reading.
Sometimes the phrases "[expletive]", "[beep]", "[censored]", and "[explicit]" are used, while it is also common (though less so) to see hyphens (e.g. abbreviations of the word "fuck" like f—k f---), a series of X's, or asterisks and other non-letter symbols (e.g. ****, f***, f**k, f*ck, f#@k or f#@%), remaining faithful to the audio track.
[5][better source needed] Bleeping is mostly used in unscripted programs such as documentaries, radio features, and panel games, since scripted productions are designed to suit the time of their broadcast.
[6][better source needed] 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.
[citation needed] Bleeping is commonly used in English-language and Japanese-language broadcasting, but is sometimes and rarely used in some other languages (such as Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Icelandic, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Hebrew, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Polish, Russian, Thai and Turkish), 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.
[citation needed] The Comedy Central advert for South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut had a version of "Kyle's Mom's a Bitch" where vulgarities were bleeped out, though the movie itself did not have censorship, and was given a 15 rating, despite a high amount of foul language.
Some television and cinematic productions work around the requirement of a censor bleep by writing dialogue in a language that the intended audience is unlikely to understand (for example, Joss Whedon's Firefly used untranslated Chinese curses to avoid being "bleeped",[15] while the Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes "The Last Outpost" and "Elementary, Dear Data" have the character of Captain Jean-Luc Picard utter the French obscenity, merde, which is equivalent to "shit" in English.).
