• Will It Blend?: When the gang tries to return a video camera they blended, they censor the store name. However, the colors of the store and reading the guys' lips make it fairly obvious it's Best Buy.

• The dub of Tokyo Mew Mew, despite usually trying to cut out Aizawa Mint's crush on Zakuro, had the cast imagining who a character's boyfriend might be and replaced Mint's thoughts of a male figure with Zakuro.
• When the anime of Gintama uses censor bleeps, they frequently bleep out only a single syllable of the word that's being said. It's clearly being done for the sake of comedy at times, such as when they bleep out the "P" in PSP, only to visibly show somebody playing a PSP with the logo completely in view on the back of it.
• 4Kids is notorious for its edits of violence in One Piece and Yu-Gi-Oh!, but they were much laxer when it came to shows they made themselves, such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003).
• The broadcast dub of My First Girlfriend Is a Gal started bleeping 'shit' and 'dick' starting with episode 5, despite leaving both words unbleeped in previous episodes.
• Inferno Cop's official subs by Trigger (originally used on their official YouTube upload) can't decide if they're okay with 'fuck' or not. It's left uncensored as Inferno Cop is hauled to jail in episode 3, but every other occurrence is censored by 'fxxx', though 'shit' and other mild-to-moderate profanities are okay. Averted by Crunchyroll, who leave all the F-bombs uncensored.
• The broadcast dub of Prison School started out avoiding F-bombs, but leaving 'shit' uncensored. However, partially muted F-bombs began to be added to the script after a few episodes and with them, 'shit' began to be muted. One must wonder why they bothered, as the show was already rated TV-MA and the words came out as "f(silence)ck" and "sh(silence)t".
• When Mind Game was shown on Toonami, the words 'fuck', 'fag', 'pussy', and 'cunt' were partially censored in the subtitles as 'f**k', 'f*g', 'p***y', and 'c**t'. However, the actual audio wasn't censored at all, likely based on the logic that the majority of viewers couldn't speak Japanese.
• Perhaps due to an error in editing, the bleeps from the Japanese audio of Back Street Girls are still audible in the English dub, despite the audio being uncensored. This leads to things such as the words 'fuck' and 'dick' inconsistently having a Sound-Effect Bleep played over them that doesn't actually hide the word at all.
• On the original Netflix release of Ouran High School Host Club, the subtitles that match the dub's dialogue (as opposed to the subs literally translated from the original Japanese audio) substituted all uses of the word "tranny" with "cross-dresser", even though the dub's audio still leaves the word intact. When the show was removed and then re-added in the early 2020's, new subtitles were made that kept the word intact.
• The first English dub of Sailor Moon infamously tried to censor the lesbian relationship between Sailors Uranus and Neptune. They did so by declaring Uranus and Neptune were cousins... and changed almost nothing else. So now instead of a normal lesbian relationship, everyone thought they were in an incestuous lesbian relationship.

• Image Comics in The '90s would often censor itself from saying "ass" by writing "a$$". This even though they ignored the Comics Code Authority and had brutal violence in their comics.
• The Ultimate Warrior's short-lived comic book, Warrior, has him yelling F-F-U-U-C--◊ at one point. (How the Warrior is capable of pronouncing the C and not the K can be probably attributed to his near-divine skills.)
• Milestone Comics usually showed scribbles in place of the strongest obscenities, but the last issue of the Blood Syndicate spinoff miniseries My Name is Holocaust slipped in an instance of Holocaust saying "fuck" uncensored and the third issue of the Deathwish spinoff miniseries of Hardware (1993) ends with Marisa Rahm saying "fuck" uncensored. Wise Son: The White Wolf, another miniseries spining off from Blood Syndicate, was the one series that didn't censor the stronger profanities at all.
• Empowered makes liberal use of this, despite that its creator is pretty much his own boss on the project. He says that it wound up being funnier that way.
• All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder #10 had very frequent swearing, with black bars added over the swear words. Unfortunately, they prepared them incorrectly and the swear words could easily be read through the black bars.
• Rat-Man usually resorts to Symbol Swearing, but the story arc parodying The Walking Dead parodied (of course) this trope by having Anubis, the sentient zombie that cosplays Batman, use swearwords with a single letter changed because, as he says, otherwise it would be obscene.
• Parodied in one issue of Invincible (2003) when the story cuts away from an imminent sex scene, prompting writer Robert Kirkman to appear and claim that he wants to keep this comic kid friendly. "This comic" being one absolutely filled to the brim with gorn, profuse swearing, adult drama, and sexual situations far beyond the mundane heterosexual sex that was cut away from.
• Howard Chaykin's Squadron Supreme series that followed up on J. Michael Straczynski's Supreme Power continuity censors the word "shit" by rendering it as "$#!+".
• Harleen inconsistently flip flops between Symbol Swearing and uncensored cursing.

• Has become a staple in most Abridged Series.
  • Happens often in Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series.
  • Sailor Moon Abridged gets a special mention for using a klaxon alarm exclusively to censor the word "fuck". And only the word "fuck".
  • Dragon Ball Z Abridged had fun with this trope in one episode where Vegeta's swears are censored by Jeice's scouter beeps (his scouter was acting shonky) except for at the end. Played with at the end of the episode:
    "Son of a gum-chewing funk monster! Why the fruit does all this funny stuff happen to me?! Forget my life! Always surrounded by miserable failing clods! Like this whole world just likes to bend me over and find me in the Alps, like I'm some sort of schlock receptacle! Well as far as I care, these miserable cows can have a fancy barbecue with a god damn pig!"
    • What makes it funnier is that in the censored version, he clearly says "Son of a g*d-d*mn f*ck beast! Why the f*** does all this f*** sh** happen to me?"
• None Piece:
  Zoro: I dragged his ass two miles and you had the *bleep* key the whole *bleep* fucking time!?
• From another of PurpleEyesWTF's works, "Pokemans: The Adventure":
  Pikachu: Aw, what the fuck!? Get the *bleep* outta here!
• Rocketship Voyager is written like a 1950's science fiction magazine story, with words like b***ds and g*d**n censored even though they're tame by today's standards.
• In the Parody Fic Farce Contact, the crew of Star Trek: The Original Series encounter the Enterprise from Star Trek: Enterprise and are surprised to find it's more advanced than their own Enterprise with real-time subspace communication, ship-to-ship visual, and uncensored swearwords.
  "Holy [censored], Jim! If they're from the past, how come their technology is more advanced than ours?"
• Delta Quadrant Targs is a Star Trek: Voyager meets Reservoir Dogs comedy, so uses this trope in place of the Cluster F-Bomb of the film.
  "Drop the $%^ing weapon! Resistance is @!#ing futile!" the Borg drone's droned, waving their assimilation tubules in B'Elanna's face.

• Downplayed in the The Angry Birds Movie due to not using actual swears but in the UK DVD and Blu-Ray version, the movie censored "Pluck My Life" and "Angry Flocking Birds" which is just word play in the North American version. What the UK did instead was change Red's lines just to get a U rating for home video release. However, watching the movie on Netflix in the UK still kept the original lines.
• At first, Arthur's Missing Pal refrains from letting the audience hear the characters say the word "toilet". But then, the last scene includes a flashback where we hear D.W. saying the word repeatedly. We even get to hear her say the word "pee" at the very end of the movie.
• Sausage Party got censored on FX which is why you hear stuff like "That's super messed up about Bill and those guys", "Man, I hate this job", "Oh, my freakin' freak", "I'll tell you exactly what happened in the Great Beyond, you dumb red piece of crap", "It was you! You fat ugly bagel moron", and "Once you see that stuff, it'll mess you up for life". However the orgy scene was handled differently as it can either be skipped entirely or show a censor bar. In the latter's case the censor bar doesn't help a lot as you can still see what's going on.
• When Shrek 1 airs on Nickelodeon, the word "damn" is only censored once out of the multiple times it is used (in Donkey's line "Parfaits may be the most delicious thing on the whole damn planet."). The song "Bad Reputation" by Joan Jett, featured in the fight scene, uses the word several times, and all are intact. The movie's first use of the word, when Donkey's owner calls him "the talkingest damn thing you ever saw", is also uncensored. Much later in the movie, Donkey's line "No one likes a kiss-ass." has "ass" censored in the audio, but it remains uncensored in the closed captioning.

• In Hot Fuzz, a Swear Jar is shown. Each swear is given various rates, while some letters are replaced by Symbol Swearing. Except the word with the highest rate, cunt.
• Cry-Baby contains three uses of "fuck", all in the same scene. Originally having a rating of PG-13, the first two uses were bleeped out while the third was not. Later unrated home media releases had all three uses uncensored.
  Wanda: Would you just get me the [bleep] out of here?
  Maggie: What's "[bleep]" mean, Hector?
  Hector: Oh, Maggie, it's just a teen nonsense word Wanda uses to make herself feel all grown-up.
  Maggie: Your Honor, could we take Wanda the fuck home?
• After the success of Saturday Night Fever, Paramount decided to market it to younger audiences that had to miss out by making a "PG Version". This cut removed all uses of "fuck", "shit", and "cunt" either by redubbing lines, cutting them entirely, or using alternate takes with less profane dialogue that were intended for potential TV airings, especially in scenes that had frequent swearing. However, some of the racial and homophobic slurs used throughout the film are still intact, which would be unheard of in a PG-rated movie today. In the PG version, the scene where Tony and Stephanie walk to the car after the dance competition is entirely reshot with alternate dialogue, though "spic" is still retained, and in this take only, Tony ad-libs, "Huh, bitch?", which he did not say in the original R-rated version, and all other uses of "bitch" were removed for the PG version. "Jesus" and "Jesus Christ" were also mostly removed from the PG version, but one use was left in during the scene where Bobby C. plays on the bridge, immediately after a point where another use had been cut.
  • On Australian TV airings, "cunt" is removed. The scene where Tony and Annette walk down the stairs to the dance school abruptly cuts off before Tony's line, "Are you a nice girl or a cunt?", despite the offensive word being redubbed to "pig" in the PG version and American TV airings. All scenes that show characters having sex in cars are cut, but all other profanity is left intact.
• A literal example of this trope occurs in the presentation of an extended version of the attack on Tony Stark's convoy in the bonus features for Iron Man (2008), where Tony drops a censored f-bomb after realizing the rifle he attempts to use on the attackers was jammed and almost immediately says "damn it," itself uncensored, not long after.
• In some TV showings of The Lost Boys, a scene where Michael points to a bush outside their grandpa's window and mimes puffing on a joint was cut, but scenes where vampire bites sent blood flying and graphic tearing of flesh were left intact. In at least one case, the line about "My own brother, a God-damned shit-sucking vampire!" had the word "God" bleeped but not the "damned" that followed it, making it a literal example.
• The 1960s anti-pornography documentary Perversion for Profit displays a number of images from porn magazines, with the models' faces and naughty bits blocked out. Only it's not very consistent — which faces are obscured and which are not seems to be entirely arbitrary, and in at least one case a woman's nipples are left in full view.
• In Between Two Ferns: The Movie, Zach Galifianakis screws up his attempt to censor a certain profanity in his interview with Benedict Cumberbatch.
  Zach: Why do Brits love the word "[bleep]ing cunt" so much? Fuck, I was supposed to push [the censor button] during "cunt". Why do you think that Br[bleep] love the word "[bleep]unt" so much?
• Used in a blackly comedic way in Joker (2019), when one TV channel airing the Joker's interview on Live with Murray Franklin bleeps out the Joker's Precision F-Strike, yet shows him fatally shooting Murray in full.
• When HIFI (now BBC First Canada) aired The Mechanic (2011) on November 5, 2016, only a minority of the uses of "fuck" were muted while the rest were uncensored. More info here.
• In CNN's televised airings of the documentary American Pain, the line "That's retarded, Chris." was asterisked out as "r******d" onscreen, but the audio was uncensored.
• The E! airing of Bridesmaids censors "asshole" to "ass****."
• Disney Channel airings of Home Alone 1 cut most uses of the word "hell", but it is left in when Kate asks the agent at the Scranton airport, "Where the hell am I?", even though the closed captioning is edited to say, "Where am I?". Also, despite the Disney Channel edit removing "hell", "crap", and "ass", one use of the word "damn" is left intact (the other is cut out as part of an entire portion of the scene), along with Kevin's line, "Families suck!" ("sucks" is not allowed on Disney Channel's original programming). Some of the violence is also cut rather inconsistently. Kevin shooting Marv in the head with a BB gun is cut so that the shot is not actually shown, but Kevin doing the same to Harry's groin is left unedited. Also, every time Kevin plays the tape of the murder scene from "Angels with Filthy Souls", the shots of Johnny holding the gun are zoomed in so the gun is cropped out, but we still hear the gunfire, and the shots of the victim dropping to his knees and his body continuing to get shot are still intact, making the removal of the gun pointless.
• TBS and TNT's traditional plentiful airings of A Christmas Story during the holiday season are not edited content-wise. However, when they air the sequel A Christmas Story Christmas, which is almost-always paired with the original film, all mild language is removed, even words that were present in the first film. One example is adult Ralph's line "Son of a bitch" being redubbed to "Sin of a bootch", even though Ralphie says the same thing as a child in the original film, making it more of a Precision F-Strike in that film. Another example is when Ralph's son Mark loses control of a sled and yells, "Fuuuuudge!" Despite this moment being a reference to one of the original film's most famous scenes, TV airings replace the word with generic yelling.
• Played for Laughs in Happy Gilmore, where the TV broadcast of Happy's Cluster F-Bomb after missing a shot bleeps out nearly the entire thing, barring a single atomic "fucking" that the censor missed.

• Dave Barry Slept Here parodies the Watergate Scandal's released tapes:
  NIXON: Because you have, you have problems with the, with the [expletive deleted], with the ...
  KLAUS: Yeah [garbled], with the, uh, with the ...
  NIXON: ... with, uh, with the [expletive deleted].
  KLAUS: ... with the ...
  NIXON: [Expletive deleted].
  KLAUS: ... with the Smoot-Hawley.
  NIXON: Shit.
• Discworld: In Feet of Clay Captain Carrot spends the book doing this audibly, including somehow pronouncing the asterisk.
• In Sorcerer Conjurer Wizard Witch, set in the 1930s, a character's profanity-laced tirade is dashed out, as it would have been in a work of the period if it were included at all. However, the first and last letter of each word is left in, and there's exactly one dash for each omitted letter (e.g. "b----r") so any reader can fill in the blanks if they have the vocabulary.

In General:

• Many television shows that bleep out words don't actually conceal the word at all. You can see the person's mouth, and often part of the word will be audible, so it's quite obvious what they're saying.
  • Played with in an episode of The IT Crowd: Reynholm congratulates an employee on being fast on the swear button. A few seconds later, he tells Jen "You fucked up" and the bleep is missed by a full half-second, just enough for the whole word to get through.
  • Due to the ability of viewers - particularly those who know how to lip-read - to understand audibly bleeped words, many TV shows use digital blurring to obscure the speaker's mouth. The late-night talk show Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson used a graphic of a foreign flag (as the show's bleep censor tended to be a word spoken in another language such as "Ou, la la!")
• Sebastian Bach once demonstrated on a VH1 television show how one can say the words "ass" and "hole" on television but not both words in quick succession. To demonstrate, he'd say the word "ass", then, after a long pause, would say "hole" and neither word would be bleeped; then, he'd repeat this over and over with shorter pauses in between until he finally did get bleeped. After that, he repeated this exercise from the beginning using the words "god" and "damn" with the same exact results.
• One of the more unintentionally hilarious moments from Howard Stern's TV replays of his radio show involved a behind-the-scenes shot of Gary explaining some of the finesse of radio censoring to a guest. The fact that it ends up censored when played on network TV just drives the absurd point home all the better.
  Gary: So for example, you could say "carrot", and you could say "ass" but you couldn't say "Stuck a carrot in my a**".

Award Shows:

• On the 2012 BET Awards (which are live), often announcers would say the N word and then the word after that would be silenced (for example, if someone said "Nigga, please", the "please" would end up being censored). They later overcompensated by censoring an entire verse of Rick Ross' performance.
• At the 2025 Grammy Awards, during Sabrina Carpenter's performance of "Please Please Please", the audio cut out to censor the word "motherfucker" in the song's chorus. However, shortly afterwards, when Carpenter was announced as the winner of the award for Best Pop Vocal Album, "Please Please Please" was played as she walked to the stage with "motherfucker" uncensored. Apparently, the crew forgot about the clean version of the song that replaces the word with "little sucker". Also, during her acceptance speech, Carpenter joked that she may be censored for saying the word "hell" (she was not), then ended her speech with, "Holy shit", which was censored.
• At the 2026 Grammy Awards, during Lola Young's acceptance speech after winning Best Pop Solo Performance, she said, "Thank you so much. Obviously, you can tell by my fucking— Sorry." On the televised broadcast, the audio cut out and back in too early, resulting in the words "Obviously, you can tell by my" being censored, and the F bomb coming right in immediately as the audio came back. Viewers were amused at this, especially after many felt CBS was being overly cautious about censoring things during prior performances and speeches, such as Sabrina Carpenter's performance of "Manchild" being censored even when she changed the F words to just "eff".

Series:

• A good chunk of the British Docu Soap Airline was angry passengers venting their frustrations to airport staff after being late for their flight or other issues, so naturally most episodes have language that needs to be censored. The word "piss" is bleeped or silenced out in some episodes, but not in others. "Bollocks" is usually bleeped out, though, in one episode, a woman uses it uncensored and then argues that "'Bollocks' is not a swear word". One man even managed to get away with saying "goddamn" uncensored. The blurring of people's mouths or lack thereof is also very inconsistent, sometimes even within the same episode. The show also sometimes uses two different bleep sounds in the same episode, or even in the same sequence. In the episodes available for free streaming on YouTube, only "fuck" is censored.
• Arrested Development often like to time their bleeps so that the cursing was readily apparent. Most notably in a season 2 episode where Gob is warning the Bluth staff to not hit on his sister. The scene starts with him saying, "and no *bleep*cking my sister." Later the episode flashes back to the same speech only they moved the bleep, "and no fu*bleep* my sister."
• Bar Rescue: An owner was wearing a shirt reading "I have the dick. So I make the rules". Somehow, verbal references that acknowledged the shirt were uncensored, yet the word "Dick" was blurred out on the shirt itself. There have also been several instances throughout the show where the second part of "asshole" is censored.
• Black Lightning episode "The Book of Little Black Lies" has captioning that censors out the word "ass" (but they leave the audio alone). The word is replaced with ellipses (...).
• When one watches Breaking Bad on Netflix with closed captions turned on, any profanities are blanked out and replaced with dashes despite the audio being left unaltered.
• A gag reel for the 1970s private eye series Cannon pokes fun at the idea. The gag reel was produced for a cast and crew party and begins with star William Conrad telling the viewers that out of respect to folks in the audience the gag reel bleeps any offensive language. The first outtake proceeds to have every word except the swear words bleeped, causing a flustered Conrad to come on screen again and apologize before heading off-screen telling the editors to bleep the dirty words "and leave the clean ones in!"
• Happens on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report all the time!
  • The "Go F*ck Yourself" gospel choir, first glorious outing here. Not only do the bleeps make it more obvious that the choir is swearing, but they also pinpoint every swearword which you might otherwise have missed.
• On Dance Moms, some milder words such as "crap", "screw", and "bitch" are bleeped in some episodes, but not others. This is likely a case of Manipulative Editing in some cases to make it seem like somebody said something worse. In one instance, Abby said "crap" when criticizing Maddie's performance and it was bleeped, though when that moment was shown in a later episode as a flashback, it was not.
• On E!'s documentary series Dirty Rotten Scandals, "shit" is not bleeped despite the same network always censoring that word from movies they air. In the two episodes on The Price Is Right, "fucking" and "dick" are used once each and are censored (the former is muted and the latter is bleeped), but "shit" is consistently uncensored in the audio. The first use of the latter word, said by Kathleen Bradley at the end of Part 1, is written in the closed captioning as "[bleep]" despite not actually being bleeped, though all uses in Part 2 are uncensored in both the audio and captions.
• In the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary series O.J.: Made in America, words like "fuck" and "shit" are bleeped in some cases, but only when using stock footage where they were bleeped originally. In the actual interviews, there's no filter. "Nigger" isn't bleeped, since it's relevant to the subject material.
• On Hallmark Channel's airings of The Golden Girls, the word "hell" is censored, but only if a character says, "Go to Hell", and even that is inconsistent; the last line of the episode "Questions & Answers" is Dorothy saying, "Ah, go to Hell, Ma", which is not censored on Hallmark. The word is frequently used in other contexts ("What the hell", "Like hell", "The hell it is", even "Hell no") and is not censored.
  • In the episode "Old Friends", Rose's Precision F-Strike line, "Just cut the crap and get back the damn bear." has "crap" and "damn" censored on Hallmark airings. The latter word is uncensored every other time the word is said in the series, which is often, sometimes even in the same context as in Rose's line, such as Blanche calling a politician a "damn liar" a few episodes later. "Crap" is also not censored in Hallmark airings of the episode "Bang the Drum, Stanley", in which Dorothy says at one point, "How about cutting the crap?"
• In Tim & Eric's HBO segment Just 3 Boyz, the entire scene where Zach accuses Tim and Eric of masturbating into a chicken is riddled with misplaced horn honks.
  Eric: We gotta sync it up. When we say "cum" you hit the honk. *honk*
• Parodied in a MADtv (1995) sketch where a network censor (Jordan Peele) vetoes various lines in a script for a fictional sketch starring Michael McDonald and Ike Barinholtz:
  • When Ike asks if the word "bitch" is problematic, the censor states that it is not, but only seven uses of it are allowed in half an hour; any more would be "word tonnage". Michael then says the word several times in a row while counting on his fingers, and every instance after the seventh one is bleeped (counted separately from the three times the word is used before this).
  • They can say "jackass" and "jackhole", but not "asshole" (bleeped). Ike asks, "What about 'A-hole'?", which is allowed. Michael then asks, "Can you say, 'You have been an ass this whole time'?", which the censor also agrees to.
  • A homosexual cannot be referred to as a "fag" (bleeped). Michael argues that word is what people call a cigarette in England, and that he should be able to say, "I just took a long, dry puff off a fag" (uncensored).
  • Anal sex cannot be referred to as putting "junk in the trunk" (bleeped). Michael asks if he can say, "I'm going to take a box of junk and put it in your trunk", which the censor allows as long as he doesn't point to anyone's genitals when saying it.
• Lampshaded in Malcolm in the Middle after Malcolm publishes in the school literary magazine a powerful story that has swearing to get the point across. The principal, outraged, says that he will not allow the words "S*ck my c*ck" in a school magazine (with his mouth very clearly saying the words) and to put asterisks on them. Malcolm replies "What's the use of censoring it? Everyone knows what they are saying!"
• @Midnight: For whatever reason, they were showing a greeting card with a cross-section of a "pregnant cat lady," with the cat clearly on its way out. The censors had pixelated just the breast.
  Chris: We don't anyone to be offended by a nipple, so there's just a cross-section of a lady with a cat coming out of her vagina!
  Chris: This is what's fun. See, uh, that big pussy comes out of that big [BLEEP], and if my Standards and Practices calculations are correct only one of those got bleeped.
• History Channel's Pawn Stars has the Old Man doing this verbatim to the three others.
  Old Man: [Bleep] Dammit, Chumlee!
• When Current TV had the Rotten Tomatoes movie review show, only parts of the expletives were bleeped, sometimes the bleep missed the word entirely, and it was usually obvious what word was being bleeped.
• Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe has this episode bleeped out for the first obscenity — then is followed immediately by an Atomic F-Bomb with no bleeping.
• On at least one episode of This is Wonderland, a perpetrator roared out a Precision F-Strike, which when first aired on CBC Television, it was censored. Unfortunately, the scene takes place in an old Toronto City Hall courtroom, whose walls are infamous for echoing...
• In an episode of The Eric Andre Show where Hannibal sings "Hard in da Paint", the censor bleeps over most of the curses and the word "paint" but not any of the n-words.
• Most uses of "shit" in The Liquidator are censored with the show's high-pitched censor bleep. However, one episode has a part where the title man says, uncensored and directly to the camera, "It's hard to bullshit a bullshitter."
• In a November 10, 2016, airing of the Trailer Park Boys episode "If You Don't Believe It, It's Not Real" on HIFI (now BBC First Canada), all uses of "fuck" were muted and replaced with dashes in the closed captioning. However, "pussy" was only censored in the closed captioning, and "asshole" was only censored in the audio (with "arsehole" being left completely intact). More info here.
• On one broadcast of The Today Show, Meredith Vieira accidentally dropped some of her papers right as the show was returning from a commercial break and said, "Oh, shit." Her co-hosts broke into hysterics, especially after a bleep sounded about ten seconds after the fact.
• In one segment on a 2007 episode of The View, Whoopi Goldberg presents the topic of discussion to the panel: Is it okay to use "the F word" in the office? The panel then cites various recent examples of public figures recently using the word. Although they only say "F" as a stand-in for the word, it is still bleeped out, except when Goldberg first presented the topic. However, when Joy Behar posed an example of someone exclaiming the word in pain after hitting their hand, she did use the word, to the shock of the rest of the panel and studio audience. The hosts did not acknowledge the necessity of a bleep until after Behar's slip, apparently not being aware that they were being bleeped just for saying "F" as well.
• In an episode of Ridiculousness, a clip had the word "bitch" bleeped out, but the onscreen subtitle was uncensored. One of the hosts of the show then repeated the word uncensored.
• Reality shows involving Gordon Ramsay such as Kitchen Nightmares are shown on morning TV on Channel Four. This poses an issue whereby, for daytime viewing, C4 are careful to use versions with the copious swearing bleeped out. Unfortunately, nobody at C4 thought to check the subtitles. Every meticulously bleeped "Fuck!" on the soundtrack was reproduced, faithfully, in writing, on subtitles meant for later-night viewing.

• Spotify has no set standards on what merits a song being marked "explicit". Because of this, a song not marked "explicit" may still contain uncensored words like "shit" and "bitch", while other songs are explicit for including those words. This is because it is entirely up to the record label what is "explicit", with no say from Spotify itself. They used to have a function to report a song as explicit if it was not marked as such, but it was removed. For example, "Bad Romance" by Lady Gaga is marked explicit for a few uses of the word "bitch", while "Boss Bitch" by Doja Cat, which uses the word far more often, is not. For a time, "Rolling in the Deep" by Adele was marked explicit for a single use of the word "shit" in the first verse that most of the general public misinterprets as "ship", while "Same Old Love" by Selena Gomez, which has "shit" in every chorus, was never labeled as such.
  • In addition, when streaming a clean version of a song, the lyrics feature will often still show the lyrics from the explicit version.
• This was a common issue for the US version of Radio Disney, who in their final years relied more on in-house edits than artists' re-recordings (though they still happened on occasion).
  • Radio Disney censored the title of multiple songs from the actual lyrics, including Dua Lipa's "IDGAF", Maroon 5's "What Lovers Do", Machine Gun Kelly and Camila Cabello's "Bad Things", and Madison Beer's "Hurts Like Hell". However, all of these except for Madison Beer's "Hurts Like Hell" had the original title appear on Radio Disney's top song charts as well as car radios. In the case of "Hurts Like Hell", the title was censored to "Hurts So Bad" on the chart and car radios but was shown as the original when streaming the station through iHeartRadio.
  • Radio Disney Russia's policy on English swear words seems to be only to censor them if they're loud and clear. For example, in Ariana Grande's "7 Rings", "Been through some bad shit, I should be a sad bitch" is left intact in a softer tone of voice that's easy to miss, but the loud and clear "Bought matching diamonds for six of my bitches" has the "bitches" censored.
  • Radio Disney's edit of The Jonas Brothers' "Cool" changes "Dammit, I'm feeling so cool" to "Man, I'm just feeling so cool"; however, while the song was in popular rotation, they regularly played a promo during commercial breaks (sometimes right after the edited version of the song played) which included a snippet of the song with the original 'dammit' verse.
  • Radio Disney's edit of Ariana Grande and Social House's "Boyfriend" replaces "But you don't want me to touch nobody else" in the chorus with "But you don't want me to see nobody else"; however, the first verse contains the lyric "But I don't wanna miss your touch", and the very end of the song has the original "touch nobody else" lyric.
  • There are multiple Radio Disney edits in which a line is acceptable once but not when repeated, such as Fitz and the Tantrums' "HandClap" ("'cause you've been sinning"), Camila Cabello's "Shameless" ("I do anything I want to you", and Ariana Grande, Miley Cyrus, & Lana Del Rey's "Don't Call Me Angel" ("You can't pay my price").
  • Radio Disney has historically edited references to lovers being in the backseat together in songs such as Aaron Carter's "Not Too Young, Not Too Old", The Chainsmokers' "Closer", and Hilary Duff's "All About You". However, Loote's "This Is How U Feel" has the repeated verse of "Lying in your backseat, time stops", which is not edited (though the song was tweaked by them to remove a reference to lying to the police).
  • Radio Disney remained uncertain for years as to whether the word 'lover' was even allowed, creating odd situations such as this recording in which Jacob Latimore's "Heartbreak Heard Around The World" has the word "lover" censored in the chorus, with Becky G's "Shower" playing less than a half-hour later with the line "You are my homie, lover and friend" intact. This issue appeared to had resolved by 2019, in which they added Taylor Swift's "Lover" (and later, its remix with Shawn Mendes) to the playlist.
  • The line "Still laying in your bed saying" was cut from Ariana Grande & Justin Bieber's "Stuck with U", despite the fact that Radio Disney has played a song called "Your Side Of The Bed" by Loote and also kept "The bed's getting cold and you're not here" in Selena Gomez's "The Heart Wants What It Wants".
  • Demi Lovato's "Get Back" was edited from "Kiss me, like you mean it" to "Hold me, like you mean it", despite the fact that the act of "holding" someone is generally seen as more intimate than kissing.
  • Jessica Simpson's sultry "Irresistible" had its pre-chorus line changed from "I know I meant to say no" to "Right now I'm gonna say no", creating an odd situation where Simpson breathlessly moans about how irresistible a guy is while at the same time rejecting him.
  • Alex Aiono's "Work The Middle" has the main chorus of "Bring your body, mama, work the middle/Just a little, don't tell nobody". This is changed to "Bring your body, mama, work a little/From the middle, don't tell nobody". This is a completely bizarre change, both because the phrases are just flipped and because "work the middle" doesn't even have an established meaning for Disney to object to.
  • For the implied swearing in the chorus of Cher Lloyd's "Want U Back" ("I don't give a shh"), they simply muted the "shh", making it sound like Cher is actually swearing.
• This is a consistent problem with BBC Radio, particularly when trying to edit hip-hop songs for Ofcom's strict pre-watershed rules. Some older songs are less edited; for example, in the same block of music, you could hear Eminem's "My Name Is" with references to "acid", "dope", and "drugs" intact, but then hear Blueface's "Thotiana" remix with Cardi B that has "dope dealer" and "gang" censored.
• Kid Rock:
  • In the album Devil Without a Cause, the song "I Got One for Ya" has its one use of "fuck" censored even when it's uncensored elsewhere on the album.
  • In a live recording that includes "Prodigal Son" and "Only God Knows Why", the only word that gets censored is "ho", with both uses of it being inadequately muted.
• The radio edit of Five Finger Death Punch's "Jekyll and Hyde" is an inversion of the trope name, as it censors "damn" instead of "god".
• In the radio edit of Panic! at the Disco's "I Write Sins Not Tragedies", the word "god" is muted out of the phrase "closing the goddamn door". The uncensored version is often played on radio stations with an alternative music format.
• The radio edit of Fall Out Boy's "This Ain't a Scene, It's an Arms Race" mutes "god" out of the phrase "this ain't a scene, it's a goddamn arms race".
• The radio-edited version of the song "Keys" by Soul Position. All the curse-words are blanked out, but due to the echo effect on the vocals, you can clearly hear various "fuck"s or "shit"s echoing off in the background after the censored bits.
• The radio edit of the song "Dynamite" by Taio Cruz contains the lines "I'm in the club, so I'm gonna do, do, do, do / Just what the fuck I came here to do, do, do, do. Yeah, yeah." The 'fuck' is, of course, censored but slightly late and with a distortion rather than silence, so the end result is that it sounds exactly like he's singing "Just what the fuck I'm here to do..."
  • Some radio stations censor the line further by covering up "Just what the f***" with the "yeah, yeah" at the end of the line. Others skip the line entirely, making it say "...gonna do, do, do, do...Yeah, yeah. / 'Cause it goes on and on and on..." Some stations replace "the f***" with "my crew" from earlier in the verse ("Just what [my crew] came here to do...").
• The original version of "Secrets" by Mary Lambert is marked as explicit on most services due to one use of "shit" near the beginning of the song. However, the remix featuring B.o.B is not, even though that line remains unchanged. The radio edit, which is not available on streaming, changes "my shit" to "my life".
• The official clean version of "7 Rings" by Ariana Grande censors "bitch(es)" the second time it's sung, but not the first time, likely because "sad bitch" is often misheard as "savage", which the phrase is rhymed with during the next line.
• Lady Gaga:
  • "Poker Face" from her debut album "The Fame" secretly sneaks in the words "fuck her face" in the post-chorus. The official lyrics included in the album booklet insist that the words are "poker face" throughout, but there is clearly a different vowel sound during some repetitions. This has resulted in some radio stations playing an edit of the song that replaces all the hidden uses of "fuck" with "pok-" from the other repetitions, while other stations play the song as-is. Over the years, Gaga has admitted to the subliminal line, and often sings it clearly during live (non-televised) performances. Public knowledge of the line eventually reached the point of having it written on lyric websites, and was even shown in the lyrics on Spotify and in the closed captioning of the music video, but the song was not marked as explicit until 2025. Even then, some Spotify listings of the song in compilation albums do not have the explicit label. Conversely, most releases of the aforementioned radio edit (available on Now That's What I Call Music! compilations) are now marked explicit as well.
  • At the same time "Poker Face" was marked explicit, "Paparazzi" was as well, due to one use of the word "shit" during the bridge. Despite this, other songs on "The Fame" that use the same word (such as "Beautiful, Dirty, Rich" and "Paper Gangsta") are not marked as such, and never have been.
  • The "explicit" version of the Telephone music video is not completely uncensored. A graphic reading "WHAT THE F**K IS YOUR PROBLEM?" is still censored, and Beyonce's line "I knew you'd take all my honey, you selfish motherfucker." is still bleeped. The song itself is not explicit to begin with.
  • On the album Born This Way, "bullshit" is not censored in the song Scheiße (itself the German word for "shit"), although "horse shit" is censored in the song Bad Kids ("Enough is enough with this horse sh**!").
  • When the album MAYHEM was first released, "Killah" was marked as explicit for containing one use of "shit" (and "ass"), but "How Bad Do U Want Me", which contains the word "fucked", was not. Three days after the album's release, the latter was marked as explicit as well.
• Quite frankly most censorship in music results in this, especially when the censored word is part of a rhyme. In the context of the lyrics the intended meaning is generally pretty obvious anyway.
• The American Top 40 edit of Rihanna's "S&M" silences "sex" the first time it is used in the chorus, but not the second.
• Parodied by Flight of the Conchords in their song "Mother'uckas". Throughout the song, they self-censor themselves by skipping certain letters in swear words, but all it does it just highlight the swears.
  Too many mutha'uckas
  -uckin’ with my shi...
• "Jerry Springer" by "Weird Al" Yankovic features a spoken section in the middle during which a character says "bibleepitch"; that is, the bleep appears to have been inserted between sounds instead of dubbed over, so you can hear the whole word (just with a gap in the middle). Justified in that the woman was addressing an actual bitch ^note as in a dog, in this case, poor Woofie, so they had to make the pun obvious while still aping The Jerry Springer Show's bleep-ridden dialogue.
  • During Weird Al's "Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour", he told a story in which his song "One More Minute" was the subject of this kind of censorship when he filmed a music video for Dick Clark's Rock & Roll Summer Action. The network thought the line "I'd rather clean all the bathrooms in Grand Central Station with my tongue" was inappropriate, and they bleeped out the word tongue. Weird Al just thought that made the line sound even worse than what was originally intended.
• Drake's song "Best I Ever Had" has a clean version that changes the chorus from "You da fuckin' best" to "You da, you da best". However, they fail to censor other words such as "niggas" (which ends up sounding like "nigs") and "pussy" (which ends up as "pissy").
• Someone complained about the use of the "ass" in the song "Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny." Someone else responded with a version that censored enough words to make it sound... wrong. And didn't censor the "ass."
• The radio edit of Macklemore's "Thrift Shop" changes the often-used "this is fucking awesome" to "this is, this is awesome" or "this is __cking awesome".
  • Some radio versions also censor the word "ass" out of the lyric "The people like 'Damn! That's a cold-ass honky'"... But if you listen carefully there's a backing vocal that repeats that line, which still goes uncensored.
• Weezer's "El Scorcho" has the opening line "Goddamn you half Japanese girls". The two variations on the radio edit both censor "god" but not "damn" - one bleeps out "god", the other just briefly reverses the vocals for that one syllable, making it sound like "dog damn".
  • "We Are All On Drugs" had to be bowdlerised into "We Are All In Love" in order for the video to get airplay... But the very beginning of the video has a clear shot of Rivers Cuomo reading a newspaper where the real song title is in large print as the front page headline, and this scene wasn't cut or blurred out.
• The word "shit" in Les Savy Fav's "One Way Widow" is bleeped out. This was done willingly by the band in order to make it sound like a radio-edited single.
• Incredibly, there's a clean version of A$AP Rocky's "Fuckin' Problems". The first line of the hook "I love bad bitches, that's my fuckin' problem" becomes "I love bad bad, that's my prob my problem", while most other instances of those or similar words are muted out.
• iTunes apparently has a policy of censoring potentially offensive song or album titles with asterisks, but not artist names. It's understandable because censoring intentionally awkward band names could make certain artists impossible to search for, but it gets a little silly when you look up the band Holy Fuck and find that the title of their Self-Titled Album is censored even though the band name is not.
  • Later on, most uses of "fuck" in text on the iTunes Store became uncensored, but they still seem to avoid having album covers with the word. For example, their release of the Buckcherry EP "Fuck" once had the uncensored cover art, but it now uses a version that is cropped to remove the word, only showing the circle with the big letter "F". However, as of 2023, all uses of the word in the song titles, except the first song, are uncensored.
• "The Greenhouse" by Animals That Swim had a rather strange edit for its single release: the word "marijuana" was cut... yet unambiguous references to "pot" and "hemp weed", as well as a pun on "grass", were all allowed to stand. A Precision F-Strike was also cut.
• Aerosmith's title track on the album "Just Push Play" parodies this in its chorus.

  Just push play, *Beep*ing A!
  Just push play, they're gonna beep it anyway.

  • However, in the last chorus, they actually reverse it, leaving the Precision F-Strike while bleeping the word Beep.
• The Vimeo version of Bloodhound Gang's "The Bad Touch" censors only the word "doggy". It's kind of a hard song to censor since it consists of nothing but blatant innuendos, but none of the words are actually dirty.
• One of the videos for Denis Leary's song "Asshole" has a video version of this. At one point the line is "I use public toilets and I piss on the seat". The audio is untouched, but at the point of 'piss', the video is the word 'BLEEP' on a black background (he wasn't demonstrating). The radio edit actually does have a bleep at that point, but the "bleep" screen remains in the uncensored version.
• The official clean version of Snoop Dogg's "Gin and Juice" has one exclamation of "biatch" left in at the end but not the other.
• "Pipebomb On Lansdowne (Extended Dance Remix)" exploits this trope for deliberate comic effect.
• The Radio Disney Music Awards performance of Ariana Grande's "Dangerous Woman". Despite being a very racy song (especially for a children's award show), the only lyric removed is 'skin on skin', though the lyric afterwards ('oh my God, don't you stop, boy...') is left intact.
• A radio station in New Zealand tried to get away with removing only the 'F' sound in Lily Allen's "Fuck You", making it the rather bizarre "Uck You". It didn't work as planned and was determined to be in violation of radio standards.
• Kidz Bop:
  • Their cover of Katy Perry's "California Gurls" changes and/or cuts several lines, such as "Daisy Dukes, bikinis on top", and skips the second verse entirely, but what's not changed is the line "So hot, we'll melt your popsicle", which is a metaphor for making a man ejaculate.
  • Their cover of "The Lazy Song" by Bruno Mars obviously changes the lines "have some really nice sex" and "Oh, my God, this is great", though "God" is surprisingly not changed to "gosh" like in other cases.
  • Their cover of "50 Ways to Say Goodbye" by Train changes many lines, being a song about death covered by kids with a Never Say "Die" rule played straight. One of the many causes of death mentioned in the song is, "Got run over by a crappy purple Scion". Kidz Bop changes "got run over" to "she went away", but keeps the word "crappy", which is no doubt the closest word to a profanity they have let slide so far.
  • Just the fact that they decided to cover Christina Aguilera's extremely sexual song "Not Myself Tonight", regardless of the lyric changes.
• If you listen carefully to the radio edit of Akon's "Locked Up", during the second chorus you can still clearly him say "My nigga, I'm locked up", even though the other usage of the N-word is blanked out.
• The clean version of Nicki Minaj's "Truffle Butter" on Spotify for whatever reason completely leaves intact Drake's "I could probably make some stepsisters fuck each other". Every other profanity is blanked out.
• The "radio edit" of Kelly's "Let Me Borrow That Top" blanks out all the F-words in the actual lyrics, but leaves in a clear exclamation of "Fuck it!" in the background at one point.
• Parodied in a "radio edit" of the Yogscast Christmas song "Carrot for a Cock", "Carrot for a Nose," wherein every instance of the word "cock" is badly dubbed over by Simon Lane singing the word "nose". This is the only change at all; none of the other lyrics are changed, and even words such as "bellend", "chode" and "dong" are left uncensored. The cover art covers the word "Cock" with "Nose" in Comic Sans and pixelates the carrot without even moving it from the snowman's crotch.
• In a weird example, Alt-J's "Hit Me Like That Snare" bleeped the word "fisting", despite using "fuck" several times completely uncensored.
• The dirty version of Missy Elliott's "Gossip Folks" has the word 'fuck' censored twice, even though 'motherfucker' is also used twice by Missy uncensored.
• The VEVO version of Amy Winehouse's "Fuck Me Pumps" censors the one instance of the word 'fuck' with a repeat of the euphemism 'eff' previously used in the song, as well as bleeping a reference to ecstasy. Despite this, the title is uncensored on VEVO and YouTube (and is even listed as "explicit" on VEVO).
• There's a "Disney edit" of Alestorm's "Fucked with an Anchor", now called "Fronked with an Anchor"... that censors everything except the profanity.
• The official lyric video for Marshmello & Anne-Marie's "FRIENDS" has the words 'shit' and 'fucking' censored on-screen as 'sh❤t' and 'fu❤king'. While the word 'fucking' is bleeped in the actual song, the word 'shit' is not, making the censorship of the former in the lyrics confusing.
• The lyric video for "Cake By the Ocean" by DNCE censors "fucking" in the chorus as "f*cking" on-screen, but the audio remains uncensored.
• The Gorillaz music video for Rock The House has the lyrics "Shake your ass crack" censored. Which is weird, considering that later in the same video we get to see Murdoc shaking his actual ass crack.
• The first clean version of Kanye West and Lil Pump's "I Love It" that was released reverses the words "fucking ho", which could have worked, except for the fact that reversing the phrase made it sound like the chorus repeatedly says "You're such a filthy whore, I love it." One obscenity is also missed entirely, as "fucked that bitch up out in London" is changed to "fucked that that out in London". Likely because of these bad edits, a completely re-recorded clean version (known as the 'freaky girl' edit) appeared on digital platforms and most radio stations.
• There are multiple clean edits of Eminem and Nate Dogg's "Shake That" with inconsistent censorship:
  • The VEVO version of the music video leaves all of the animated gyrating and ass-shaking intact, but inconsistently mutes profanity and sexual/drug references in the actual lyrics. The words 'fuck' and 'shit' can clearly both be heard once, but are muted every other time.
  • The official 'super clean' edit of the song mutes every instance of the word 'ass' except for one instance in Nate Dogg's first verse ("When I bust your ass, imma continue to rock"). The most bizarre part is that it's muted again not even two seconds later.
• Ashley Tisdale's "He Said She Said" has a 'clean' version which changes a few suggestive lyrics successfully, but replaces the words "Give it to me" with a suggestive moan and leaves the suggestive ending verses intact. Radio Disney refused this clean version, requiring Tisdale to record the song again with completely new vocals.
• There are multiple clean versions of D12's "My Band", all of which have their own issues:
  • The version on the clean version of the album "SHADYXV" has every word half-censored, if not less, leading to instances of 'fu-', 'bitc-', 'shi-', and '-ell'.
  • The version on the clean version of the album "D-12 World" censors almost every lyric with expletives (including the word 'hell'), sexual content, drugs, violence, etc. However, for some reason, the words 'ass' and 'retarded' are left intact, the latter of which is seen as highly unacceptable for current-era radio.
  • The VEVO version is almost identical to the second version, but uncensors 'hell' and censors 'retarded'. The nudity is also removed from the video; however, the original swear words are still mouthed and clearly identifiable at multiple points.
• The VEVO version of LMFAO's "Shots" distorts the words 'suck our cocks'; however, not only are the words clearly mouthed/emphasized, we see two bikini-clad models go down to the singers' waists at the same place the words are supposed to be.
• The music video for Mariah Carey's "Obsessed" barely distorts the words 'weed' and 'E'; 'weed' is distorted at the last letter, while 'E' is fully distorted but still easy to make out.
• The clean version of Nicki Minaj's "Feeling Myself" partially distorts the words 'whacks off' in a way that keeps it fully audible. It also doesn't censor the obvious innuendo following it that doubles as a reference to The Karate Kid: "Wax on? Wax off".
• A version of The Lonely Island's "I Just Had Sex" on streaming services is listed as the "edited version" - the only difference is that it censors one instance of 'fuck'. The graphic references to sex and anatomy ('put my penis inside of her', 'flop around on top of them') are all intact.
• YNW Melly's "Murder On My Mind" received a radio edit as "Mischief On My Mind", removing references to guns, drug names, swearing, etc. However, they did not change the fact that the second verse, even with a few words blanked, is clearly about a tragic accidental murder, which is a lot more than "mischief."
• Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Put 'Em On The Glass" had its topless females pixelated and some words reversed/bleeped when it was shown on music video channel The Box. The "uncensored" version of the video was shown on the Playboy Channel - while the females were uncensored, the lyrics were still censored.
• There are multiple clean versions of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion's "WAP", all of which end up with inconsistencies:
  • The clean version on Spotify and used for the music video replaces the title phrase with 'wet and gushy'. This prompted social media confusion and even articles about how 'wet and gushy' was just as dirty, if not dirtier.
  • The radio edit uploaded on Cardi B's channel uses 'wet, wet, wet' instead, and is more commonly heard on the radio. However, the sample of Frank Ski's "Whores In This House" used throughout the instrumental only has a slight warp over the word 'whores' (it sounds less emphasized, but you can still clearly tell what the word is).
  • An even cleaner edit is played on some radio stations (including any owned by iHeartRadio). The word 'whores' is censored better, along with a few additional words from the original radio edit, including 'bucket' for unexplained reasons. (Why is it acceptable to bring a mop for the wet, wet, wet but not a bucket?) On top of that, the last time Cardi says 'bucket' at the end of the song, it's not censored.
• The official clean version of Jay-Z and Alicia Keys' "Empire State of Mind" blanks 'rock' out of "Corners where we sellin' rock" as slang for cocaine, but doesn't censor "MDMA got you feelin' like a champion".
• JT Music Sometimes bleeps out swear words if the topic they're singing about is more family friendly on average.
  • "The Ooda-Booga Boogie" only has one swear, bleeped out, so it still has a Precision F-Strike feel.
  Crash: Now your mask and mine will clash / Buckle up, motherf**ker, it's time to crash!
  • "The Bastion Musical" has fun with this trope. The singer Bastion is a Mood-Swinger who goes from singing about his love for the beauty of nature to a extremely profane Killer Robot. All of his cursing is censored out by the various beeps and robotic noises that count for Bastion's "voice" in the video game proper.
• Eminem:
  • The Video version of "Guilty Conscience" makes heavy rewrites to replace 'bitches' with 'chickens' and softens the rape scene and the violence (e.g. 'stab her' becomes 'grab her') but still allows Slim to say 'don't be a retard'.
  • The live version of "3 a.m." performed on Jimmy Kimmel allows Slim to describe murdering and dismembering people and shoving a flashlight up Kim Kardashian's ass, but beeps out the word "Jesus" (or "Jaysus", rather) in the lyric "Jesus, when does it end?"
  • Some of Eminem's live performances have him randomly sliding between dirty and clean versions of his songs, generally due to flubs.
    • In this performance of "My Name Is", Dre sends him to tick the world off (as in the cleaner video version), but he still rips off Pamela Lee's tits (not her lips), and hangs his original self at 12 (rather than staying to himself in one place chasing his tail). He runs over pedestrians in a spaceship (like the album version) rather than "raping lesbians" (like in the banned version), but also his English teacher wanted to fuck him in junior high, which is even dirtier than the banned version where Slim's teacher only wanted to have sex, not fuck him. (On the album version, Slim's teacher wants to flunk him.) It's likely a mistake, since Eminem starts Corpsing after saying the line and has to let the audience rap for a bit to regain composure.
    • The famous 2001 Grammys performance of "Stan" with Elton John substitutes most of the swearing ("that's pretty crummy, man, you're like his favourite idol") but lets Stan say "I don't got shit else, so that shit helps when I'm depressed" and, uh, describe the murder of his screaming girlfriend.
  • Some lyrics in the dirty version of The Marshall Mathers LP were censored, resulting in one amusing line in the title track where the vocal track is silenced for a fairly long time before coming back with an emphatic "faggot!!". (The censored lyric was specifically naming his mother's lawyer, who was suing him at the time. It was cut for obvious reasons.)
• When CKNO-FM (NOW! Radio, Edmonton) aired "Crazy Bitch" by Buckcherry on January 24, 2018, the two uses of "fuck" in the bridge were accidentally left uncensored while all other instances of the word were censored. More info here.
• The radio edit of "Later Bitches" by The Prince Karma mutes out the first syllable of the word "bitches". Despite this, the full word can be seen when the title is shown onscreen.
• The clean album version of "Topless" by Breaking Benjamin only censors most of the letter "u" sound in "fuck", resulting in the line sounding like this: "I'm on my knees. Fu——uck you, fu——uck me."
• CKNG-FM used to air an inadequately-censored version of Tesla's cover of "Signs". The only time the F-word was censored was in the line "I made up my own fuckin' sign", with every instance of "fuckin' up the scenery" being left intact. Eventually, the station switched to the standard radio edit, which uses Five Man Electrical Band's original lyrics: "blockin' out the scenery" and "I made up my own little sign".
• There are two clean versions of "Talking Body" by Tove Lo, both of which censor the line "We fuck for life" in the chorus. The first clean version partially mutes "fuck" each time it's sung, leaving the F sound still audible. The second one, known as the "Clean Love Edit", has the line re-recorded to say, "We love for life". The latter is preferred by radio stations. On Spotify, however, the Clean Love Edit is marked as explicit, while the other clean version is not. This means that for users who have explicit music disabled, the only option for this song is to listen to the version with partial profanity, and not the version with no trace of profanity at all.
• The Tenacious D movie Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny has a clean version of the song "Beelzeboss" that has hilariously inconsistent censorship. Most of the inappropriate language is altered, but the song uses "Hades" in place of only one mention of "Hell" (leaving the other mentions of it in the song untouched) and the efforts of tiptoeing around the band's rock-off challenge having the deal that the Devil gets to take KG back to Hell to have his way with him are limited to changing "bitch" to "boy", "sex slave" to "best slave" and "rape" to "take" while doing absolutely nothing about the Devil's not-so-subtle euphemisms on what he intends to do to KG or the band's threat to "bend [the Devil] over and take [him] to brown town".
• SiriusXM is very inconsistent on how it wants to censor the swears in Green Day's "American Idiot": It'll play versions of the song with the swears bleeped, backmasked, muted, or uncensored altogether on the exact same station.
• On the soundtrack album of Home Movies, profanities are bleeped out in the song "Trust Yourself". In this song, the word "ass" is censored even though it wasn't censored when that part of the song was heard in an episode. Also, the very end of the song features a band member swearing, but the S- and F-bombs in this part are hardly censored, so you can still tell what's being said.

• Stranger Things (Stern) has a semi-hidden frenzy mode where hitting anything plays one of several soundbites of various characters saying "bullshit". Despite the audio being uncensored (the game's Adjustable Censorship simply removes the mode altogether when toggled), the word is consistently written in partial Symbol Swearing on the display.

• Because WWE is broadcast live but also has a PG rating, they have to manually bleep out any unexpected stronger profanity. If the person doing the bleeping isn't quick enough on the draw, it can result in a wrestler saying "FUCK!" followed by a second or so of silence. This is also a problem with harsher crowd chants like "You fucked up!" or "Fuck you, [wrestler]!", since they will probably only start getting bleeped out once they reach a certain volume but will otherwise be completely intelligible.

• In Six: The Musical, the word "bitch" is censored with static in the song "Don't Lose Ur Head", but the song "Get Down" has the lines, "Where my hounds at? Release the bitches (Woof)". The latter is not censored since, technically, it's referring to dogs.

• In the flash game Reincarnation: Let the Evil Times Roll, you at some point acquire a "sleeping" demon fetus. The word "sleeping" is in quotes in your inventory, and you end up feeding it to a dog.
• Rock Band:
  • In Green Day Rock Band, Billie Joe Armstrong smells like shih.
  • The censorship in DLC is pretty inconsistent when it comes to things other than swearing. Lampshaded in a Harmonix panel once on what apparently is and isn't acceptable in a T-rated game. "Some marijuana"—not acceptable. "High on cocaine" used repeatedly throughout the song—acceptable. "Drop trou and squeeze out a Cleveland steamer on my chest"—acceptable.
  • "This Ain't a Scene, It's An Arms Race" by Fall Out Boy, like the trope name, mutes out the "God" from "Goddamn". The resulting vocal line is actually pretty catchy. It's averted in the Guitar Hero 5 DLC version, however.
  • "Holiday in Cambodia" from Dead Kennedys features "Where you'll kiss [mute] or crack", presumably having a choice between the two words and keeping "crack" due to that word running longer and thus having a bigger impact on gameplay. There must have been some strange discussions in the Harmonix offices surrounding this trope.
  • This was averted by "Jerry Was a Race Car Driver" in Rock Band 3, oddly enough.
• Guitar Hero Live is very bizarre with this at times. "War Eternal" has the line "THIS IS FUCKING WAR!", which is censored in the lyrics the player has to sing during vocals - but not in the actual audio track from the song.
• The Just Dance games are very inconsistent when it comes to censoring words. Nearly all of the main games in the series are rated E10+ (Just Dance 2019, 2021, 2023, and 2024 are rated E), which means that many songs are bowdlerised. The optional on-screen lyrics denote censored words with a Dramatic Ellipsis. The very first game of the series did not contain any censoring at all with the only objectionable word being one use of "hell" each in The B52's "Funplex" and Rednex's "Cotton Eye Joe". Words are typically censored with mutes, distortions, or even re-recorded radio edits.
  • The worst offender is probably "Timber" by Pitbull featuring Ke$ha. Out of the many suggestive lyrics during Pitbull's verses, such as "I have 'em like Miley Cyrus, clothes off, twerking in their bras and thongs", the only word censored in the entire song is "damn" in the second verse, and it is not censored very well; the warp sound used to censor the word comes late and makes it sound more like it's censoring the word after it.
  • "Hell" is not censored in "Funplex", The Ting Tings' "That's Not My Name" (where it is used four times), or Ariana Grande and Zedd's "Break Free", but is in all other songs in the series, even if only used once. In Miley Cyrus' "We Can't Stop", the word is censored in the line "Can I get a 'hell no'" despite backing vocals repeating "Hell no" right after.
  • The reissue of "Cotton Eye Joe" on Just Dance Now and Just Dance Unlimited censors "hell" while the original game did not, unlike "Funplex", which, though currently not available on these games, still does not censor the word according to the song's files that can be accessed on the game's server.
  • "Damn" is not censored in The Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil", Jason Derulo's "Get Ugly", or in more recent games' reissue of Maroon 5 and Christina Aguilera's "Moves Like Jagger" from Just Dance 4 (the word acting as a censor itself, replacing the word "shit" in the line "I don't give a shit"), but is in all other songs in the series. "About Damn Time" by Lizzo was added to Just Dance 2023 Edition with the title uncensored in all instances, despite almost all other uses of "damn" in that game and subsequent ones being censored.
  • Most surprisingly, "goddamn" is not censored in Sophie Ellis-Bextor's "Murder on the Dancefloor" nor in Dua Lipa's "Love Again", despite that word not even being allowed on radio plays of the songs.
  • "Shut up" is censored in Lola Young's "Messy", despite the game featuring the song "Shut Up and Dance" by Walk the Moon, and that phrase never being censored before.
  • "Drunk" is almost-always censored, except in Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream".
  • "Gun" is censored in "Fancy", though the game uses the official clean version (with "drunk" censored additionally) where the word was already censored.
  • "Sexy" is censored in Ke$ha's "We R Who We R", but not in other songs.
  • "Freakin'" is censored in Psy's "Gentleman", but not in other songs. In fact, the word is used as a censor in Avril Lavigne's "Rock N Roll", where the official clean version of the song replaces "motherfuckin' princess" with "mother freakin' princess".
  • "Booty" is censored in "Bang Bang" by Jessie J, Ariana Grande, and Nicki Minaj but not in "Timber", Technotronic's "Pump Up the Jam", or in Coca-Cola's promotional song "The Choice is Yours", where it even appears in the background.
  • In "Bang Bang", the entire line "back-backseat of my car" is censored with only the last word being audible, but "backseat lover" is not censored in "Walk This Way" by Aerosmith and Run DMC.
  • "Buns" is censored in Snoop Dogg's verse on Katy Perry's "California Gurls", but not in Nicki Minaj's verse in Justin Bieber's "Beauty and a Beat".
  • In Skrillex's "Rock N Roll", "Oh, my God" is censored in the lyrics ("Oh, my ...") but not in the song itself. However, in Bruno Mars' "The Lazy Song", it is censored in both forms in the background lyric "Oh, my God, this is great." The religious exclamation is also censored in The Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling", but not in Nick Jonas' "Teacher" (where it is used much more prominently) or in Zay Hilfigerrr and Zayion McCall's "Juju On That Beat", where it even appears in the background twice.
  • "I Gotta Feeling" also censors the word "cup" in the line "Fill up my cup" (which even Kidz Bop didn't censor in their cover of the song!) as well as Fergie exclaiming "Drink!", though similar lines in other songs are not censored, including the more elaborate "Fill my cup, put some some liquor in it" in "Uptown Funk" by Mark Ronson featuring Bruno Mars.
  • Ke$ha's "C'Mon" censors "wine" but not "Budweiser", nor "beer" or "Jack" in "Tik Tok".
  • In Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl", the word "cherry" is censored in the line "The taste of her cherry Chapstick", apparently because they thought the word was being used as a euphemism for "vagina", even though it was not in this context.
  • In Demi Lovato's "Cool for the Summer", the word "cherry" is used as a sexual metaphor but it is not censored. Combined with other sexual lyrics, the only censor in the whole song is the expected F-word in the second verse.
  • "Body" is censored in "It's My Birthday" by will.i.am featuring Cody Wise, but not in other songs.
  • In Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance", the first use of "bitch" is muted out completely while all other uses are shortened to "bit" as in the official clean version of the song (but are still displayed as "..." in the lyrics), and "stick" (used as a penis euphemism) is censored despite an echo of the word being clearly heard right after.
  • Miley's "We Can't Stop" uses the word "line" twice ("And everyone in line for the bathroom / Trying to get a line in the bathroom"), the second use being censored to due to referring to a "line" of cocaine.
  • A spinoff game called Just Dance Summer Party (Just Dance 2: Extra Songs in Europe and Australia) contained reissues of several DLC songs from Just Dance 2, including the song "American Boy" by Estelle and Kanye West, which has the line "Don't like his baggy jeans, but I'ma like what's underneath them". In Just Dance 2, the line is not censored at all, but in Summer Party, everything after "baggy" is muted.
  • Nelly Furtado and Timbaland's "Promiscuous" (featured in Just Dance 3) censors Furtado's "Feeling on me before you bring that on", but leaves in Timbaland repeating it right after, as well as Furtado confirming her suggestive meaning ("Bring that on?"/"You know what I mean").
  • The word "freak" and its derivatives (including "freaky" in songs like "Uptown Funk") were usually censored, though in Chic's "Le Freak" from the first game, and Alexandra Stan's "Mr. Saxobeat" from Just Dance 4, where it is used prominently in the song's chorus, it is not. Starting with Just Dance 2018, the word is no longer censored at all.
  • Meghan Trainor's "All About That Bass" uses an alternate radio edit with where most of the lyrics relating to her butt are replaced. However, both routines (a female solo and an alternate male/female duet) have suggestive moves during the censored lines that contained "booty", implying that the choreography was written with the uncensored lyrics in mind to begin with. A spinoff karaoke game titled Just Sing also features the song, this time the original version... with all uses of the word "booty" censored.
  • "Swish Swish" in Just Dance 2018 censors the word 'bitch', but not the clear slang reference to the word in the chorus ("Swish swish, bish").
  • DNCE's "Kissing Strangers" has the word "lap" blanked out of "Put it in his lap" in Nicki Minaj's verse in the lyrics, though it's not edited in the actual song.
  • Ed Sheeran's "Shape of You" has the lyric "Me and my friends at the table doing shots" uncensored in Just Dance 2018 (and any Unlimited play through the 2019 or 2020 versions). The Black Eyed Peas' "The Time (Dirty Bit)" later had the word "shots" blanked out of "I just wanna take some shots" in Just Dance 2020.
  • Ashnikko's "Daisy" censors the word "screw" in the line "screw eyes", despite "screw" referring to the literal object and not the slang term, and the word "kink" is not censored. Despite the song being the radio edit, a leaked unfinished version of the map had some of the on-screen lyrics based on the explicit version, resulting in the line "Fuck a princess I'm a king" being written uncensored (but not heard), and the line "Bend a bitch backwards" written as "Bend a ... bitch backwards", adding the censor ellipsis in addition to the word instead of replacing it entirely.
  • SZA's "Kill Bill" uses the radio edit where all uses of the word "kill" are censored with a slashing sound, despite the word being in the song's title, which is shown uncensored on the game's menu and at the start of the routine.
  • Kylie Minogue's "Padam Padam" censors the line "And take off all my clothes", but not the line "Wanna see what's underneath that T-shirt".
  • A map for Young T & Bugsey's "Don't Rush" was leaked by data miners (a frequent problem in the franchise's community) about a year before it was finally added to the game. Being a song about alcohol and drugs, many words were censored, but exactly which words were censored differed between the leaked version and the final release. "Fuck" not being censored at all in the leaked version stood out the most. The final release censors the word "bando" (a term for a place where drugs are sold), but the leaked version did not, and the developers forgot to replace it with "..." in the lyrics, resulting in the word still being shown, but not heard.
  • In newer games, "hell" is usually not censored if it's referring to the "place", but is usually censored in the context of "What the hell?", etc. However, Sam Smith's "I'm Not Here to Make Friends" from Just Dance 2024 Edition does not censor it in the line, "How in the hell you gonna love somebody else?", with one character even lip syncing and gesturing emphatically as the word is said. The line "I'll put you through hell" from Tate McRae's "Greedy" was also deemed acceptable.
  • In "Thrift Shop" by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis featuring Wanz, "hell" is censored when used by itself, but not when "hella" is used, even when the latter word is used more frequently, and has been censored in this form in other songs. The line "Smells like R. Kelly's sheets" is also not censored (though the ad-lib "piss" said afterward is), despite this line alluding to Kelly's child sexual abuse, of which he was convicted in 2021, nine years after the song's release, and four years before the song's addition to the game. "Pimp" is also not censored, despite being censored in Macklemore's other song in the game, "Can't Hold Us".
• Simple, easy to understand example from Team Fortress 2's Scout. (Considering it's Valve we're talking about, this is likely completely f*cking intentional.)
• In Persona 2: Eternal Punishment, the characters occasionally swear, but some of this is left in. However, some of the more provocative swears are bleeped or censored out. This is especially prevalent with Ulala, who swears the most. (She starts off some battles saying, "Don't underestimate me, you *bleep*ing bastards!)
• Done in Poker Night at the Inventory, censoring one of Strong Bad's curse words in the line "That is some *bleep*ed up *bleep*, man!" while leaving Tycho's lines like "Fuck this shit," perfectly audible. Averted by the fact that, according to the voice actors, Strong Bad's VA literally DID say "That is some bleeped up bleep". You can go into the options and turn censor bleeps for Tycho on. His subtitles remain censored regardless of what you pick.
• Done in Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space; it even has a puzzle where a list of censored words is replaced by a grocery list, from that point on all instances of the new words become censored instead, like the Soda Poppers being referred to as the @#$% Poppers.
• In episode 2 of Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse, Sam's Identical Ancestor Sameth remarks that "most of us are (Sound-Effect Bleep)", though you can hear just enough of the start of the word to infer he's saying "assholes".
• This happens in one of Freedom Planet's hidden outtakes. Sean Chiplock drops "god***" when he was having a hard time being in-character in a line for Spade.
• The American version of Fire Emblem: Awakening tries to censor Kissing Cousins by having cousins who reach an S support referred to as "Companions" rather than husband and wife. However, all characters have generic event tile quotes they'll say to those they have an S support with, no matter who they are, so "Companions" will still passionately declare their love for each other frequently.
• The Witch and the Hundred Knight randomly bleeps a use of 'shit-for-brains' by the regularly vulgar Metallia early on, though other uses of 'shit' are left audible.
• The clean version of Lil Jon & The Eastside Boyz' "Get Low" used in Need for Speed: Underground mutes "twerk" when the Ying Yang Twins say it, but allows Lil Jon to tell the females in the audience to "twerk a little harder".
  • In the second game, all references to the police are blanked out... except for in "Riders on the Storm (Fredwreck Remix)" by Snoop Dogg ft. The Doors, which leaves the word "police" uncensored. What makes this even more jarring is that the first game didn't do this.
• In Deponia swears are mostly censored. But in one cutscene "fuck" is censored to "f*ck" in the subtitles, but left uncut in the audio.
• Brütal Legend has this a lot. Justified, given that the option for censoring out profanity says "it's funnier if you bleep them out."
  Eddie: You STUPID mother-f*ing piece of s*!
• Sony Interactive Entertainment is notorious for their strict content policy that censors or alters any Japanese games released worldwide on their platforms that show a risqué amount of skin and general fanservice... and only Japanese games. American-made games can include the same sort of content without issue, or even go further than the aforementioned Japanese games by including full-on nudity and graphic sex scenes on PS4 releases without fear of censorship. An especially infamous and noticeable example of this double-standard is the Japanese Devil May Cry 5 having to censor a joke about a blow-up doll, while the American The Last of Us Part II (released the very next year) has two lengthy, uncensored sex scenes with full-frontal male and female nudity.
• Super Smash Bros.:
  • Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U: A visual example, Peach, Rosalina, and Zelda were censored underneath their dresses. Peach has her legs darkened significantly, Rosalina has no lower body except her feet, and Zelda's dress has a covering to not expose her pelvis area. However certain actions make Zelda's lower body clip through her legs completely bypassing the censorship.
  • By the time the Altaïr Mii Costume for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate was revealed, Mii Costume trailers weren't allowed to feature the names of M-rated games that characters from them came from, instead presenting them as crossovers with the character rather than their franchise. (For example, Altaïr himself was labeled as "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate X Altaïr".) This includes the Doom Slayer despite his name containing that of his franchise's.
  • When Noah & Mio were given a spirit in early 2024 as part of the "Fresh New Faces!" event, they were not labeled as part of the Xenoblade Chronicles series, due to the ESRB imposing new restrictions on how content from T-rated games can be represented in games with lower content ratings. All of the Xenoblade content in the base game, as well as in Pyra and Mythra's Challenger Pack, is still labeled as such despite this.
• Disco Elysium:
  • As a stylistic rule, the game only censors out the slur beginning with f used to describe gay men, rendering it as "f***t" (or occasionally "f*g"), using static in the audio to reflect this. No other swearing or slurs in the script are censored, including ones of similar severity (like the 'r-' slur for disabled people), which serves to hint at the player character's repression of his own attraction to other men.
  • In The Final Cut, the f- slur is left uncensored in one particular line as an audio editing error (Fuck The World's line about who they are not), revealing the dummy word being used in the studio - "Flaubert". Another line (one of Glen's) has a similar audio editing error of the short version of the slur, in which the expected word is used.
• Whenever NOMA's song "Brain Power" appears in a rhythm game, the word "cocaine" (as part of the line "Call me a leader, cocaine") may be censored out, with varying degrees of success:
  • The arcade Groove Coaster games feature what's essentially a Lyric Video, but where the word "cocaine" would be, there's a "danger" sign instead (that only blocks the letter "i" and "n", really). But the audio is left intact! A better attempt was made in Groove Coaster: Wai Wai Party, by blatantly bleeping out the word as well.
  • EZ2ON REBOOT : R doesn't censor the audio, and it too has a lyric video. "COCAINE" is censored to "COXXXXX" in the video, making it look like this part of the song is about penises now.
  • In Pump It Up, the audio is also not censored, and in its lyric video, it shows "CXXXXXX" and a "CENSORED" stamp that appears so dramatically that it ironically makes the originally hard-to-see words (as the color of them blends in the background) more obvious.
• Whenever Pokémon names are written in English in Japanese media, they tend to use Romanized versions of their Japanese names rather than their English ones. One exception starting in 2024 is Emolga, due to it being a Clean Dub Name as "mong" is a swear word in British English (specifically a slur aimed at people with Down's syndrome). Despite this, its name is still written in Japanese as "エモンガ", which is literally "emonga".
• Fortnite has a unique example. On November 16th, 2023, the game introduced the ability for individual gamemodes to have lower age ratings than the base game's teen rating^note  in the following chapter, LEGO Fortnite, a mode developed by Epic Games themselves, would launch with an E10+ ESRB / PEGI 7 age rating, and with it they also added age restrictions for a handful of player cosmetics that would prevent them from being used in any mode not rated T / 12. In particular, nine playable outfits were made restricted^note  originally far more outfits were restricted, but community backlash reverted the restrictions imposed on most of them, which seem arbitary when compared to what was left unrestricted.
  • The Demogorgon is one of the restricted outfits, but all of the other Stranger Things characters are freely allowed to be used in every other gamemode^note  originally Chief Hopper was age restricted as well, but he was among the many that were reverted.
  • The Xenomorph is also age restricted, but the Xenomorph from Alien: Earth initally wasn't, though it was made age restricted in a later patch.
  • The Devourer is age restricted, presumably due to its monstorous appearance, but its ghostly variant Spectral Devourer is not.

• Red vs. Blue went through a very brief period where Rooster Teeth would censor some of the harsher language. This was largely due to email complaints from parents. However, they quickly changed their minds and replaced the clean episodes with uncut ones. This was decided upon because the staff believed they shouldn't be the ones to take care of other peoples' kids and that if questionable material is a problem, Red Vs Blue should be the least of their concerns.
• Justin Roiland's animated web series House of Cosbys was cancelled after four episodes because of a cease and desist from one of Bill Cosby's attorneys forbidding the creators of the series from ever mentioning Bill Cosby or using his likeness to make fun of him. The unofficial fifth episode made in response began with a version of the theme song where every mention of Bill Cosby's name was poorly bleeped out and black boxes appeared over the faces of the Cosby clones, one of them briefly drifting off of the face it was supposed to be covering.
  • The Unmarketables, one of Roiland's many proto-Rick and Morty shorts, also has fun with this by putting the bleep sound under the two f-bombs so they're still perfectly audible despite the bleep.
• In the mailbag episode of Wacky Game Jokez, 4 Kidz!, Micky tries to say "goddammit". "Dammit" gets through just fine but "God" is bleeped.
• In the GoAnimate video "Caillou Misbehaves at Amy's Baking Company and...", Amy and Samy's cursing is bleeped out due to the audio being taken from an episode of Kitchen Nightmares. However, everything Caillou says in this video is uncensored.
• Gooseworx: "No April Fools Day Video This year..." has a censor asterisk just after an uncensored "fuck":
  but don't say that or I'll fuck*ng kill you.
• In MrSpherical, the swear words are censored with sounds (such as dolphin noises), but other swear words aren't censored out.
• The Amazing Digital Circus
  • The Polish dub introduces a case of this in the pilot: the original dialogue was "Kinger, you mother-", and the Polish dub translates the swear as a cut off "skurwysynu" - the thing is, it's the first part of it that's vulgar in Polish (think "whoreson") and so the end result is basically "Kinger, you whore-".
  • In "They All Get Guns", Caine says that assuming "makes an ass out of you and Ming", somehow not tripping the usual Magical Profanity Filter. When Pomni asks "did he just say -", she gets bleeped even though it's the same exact word.
• Rabbids Short Stories: The short Schizoophrenia initially applies mosaic censoring to the genitalia of the naked humans, but later on doesn't bother and leaves their private parts in plain view.
• The Walten Files: At the start of the merch ad "Banny gets taxidermied", there's a bleep sound effect that play just after a character swears, in a way that makes the curse word still perfectly audible. After a while, the bleep sound effect starts playing randomly at the middle of sentences.

• Achewood had no problem with bad language, but would occasionally joke about poorly timed bleeps and other ineffectual uses of censorship — the word "fuck*ng" being particularly memorable.
• This Basic Instructions comic. He's hiding his friend's identity. Of course, it's a joke, because anyone who read the comic knows it is Rick. And in the very next panel, he stops even trying.
• chainsawsuit has an example that is inspired by a college TA with poor English.
• In this El Goonish Shive strip, Ellen demonstrates the ineffectiveness of this sort of censorship and questions it. The answer she gets is basically that Viewers Are Morons.
• Final Fantasy VII: The Sevening, mostly in line with the original game and its inconsistent censoring, censors Cid's swears but not Barret's, to Cloud's utter confusion.
• Mountain Time censors nudity during activities like sex and showering, despite the fact that the characters are all stick figures and therefore don't look any different naked than they do clothed. Probably Played for Laughs.
• One Drawing Of Bepsi Every Day: When 2 calls the spider an asshole, only the H is censored.
• At one point, on Pintsize's Twitter, he posts a link of his usual smut, filth, and sanity-destroying material, this containing a laughably small censor bar, with Pintsize remarking in the tweet "It's a good thing they have that censor bar there. I have no idea what's going on here."
• Yumi's Cells has inconsistent censorship, with some swear words being partially censored in some chapters and not at all in others. In one comedic example, Kindness calls the other cells bastards, and that word is only slightly pixelated.
• Zoophobia features "sh*t" and "f*ck" pretty frequently.

• An increasing trend across social media in The New '20s is censoring profanities only in written form and not in audio form:
  • Some content creators have stated that content filtering algorithms will reduce the exposure of the video if it detects profanity or other controversional, but non-profane words (such as "kill", "rape", "porn", or "pedophile") in text, but said algorithms apparently do not detect anything spoken verbally in the audio, despite most social media platforms now being capable of transcribing a video's audio. As a result, many creators won't filter their language verbally, but will censor or substitute "bad" words in their captions. Infamous substitutes include "unalive" for "kill", "grape" for "rape", "corn" for "porn", and "PDF file" for "pedophile". This theory has never been proven to be true. Said filtering also does not appear to apply to written profanities that are captured as part of the video itself, such as when written on paper or clothing.
  • Most social media platforms' automatic Closed Captioning censors profanities even if they are not censored in the video's audio. This has been widely criticized as infantilizing to the hard-of-hearing community, as they are being "protected" from swear words while hearing people are not.
  • X (formerly Twitter) was the worst about this at one time, as their captions would often censor even milder words such as "buzz" and "snot". By 2025, profanities were no longer censored at all.
  • Twitch also censors all swear words in its automatic closed captioning for live streams without affecting the audio. There is no option for the creator to turn off the censoring.
  • On Instagram, the automatic caption feature (as part of the video itself) replaces profanities in the captions with Symbol Swearing and bleeps them out in the audio. However, the bleep can be removed by making any edit to the string of symbols in the text (even just removing or changing one character). If a user tries to post a caption with an uncensored profanity, regardless of the content's audio, the app will warn the user and ask "Are You Sure You Want to Do That?" before posting. Some creators get around this by changing the censored captions to emojis to remove the audio bleeps, such as a dog emoji for "bitch", a duck emoji for "fuck", or a peach emoji for "ass". The user can also add bleeps to other words at their discretion. The closed captioning feature, which is toggled on and off by the viewer instead of the creator, censors the words without altering the video's audio.
  • On Instagram's song lyrics feature, swear words were originally uncensored. Around mid-2024, most profanities are now censored in text form by replacing all letters except the first with asterisks (e.g. "f***"), but the audio is unaltered. "Fuck", "ass", "bitch", and "whore" are among words that are always censored, but "shit" is not, despite not being allowed on radio, and also being censored in automatic captions.
• While YouTube officials have declared the site to be unsuitable for users ages 13 & under, they do not have restrictions regarding the use of expletives in the videos, but have warned that the stronger the language, the more likely they'll be demonetized & they won't monetize any video that intentionally uses them to discriminate against others. This means that despite these policies, any censored profanity on the site is all voluntary.
  • This has lead to jarring instances where you could find channels on the platform that either censors any expletive except for "hell" and "damn" respectively (i.e. Cartoon Hooligans, Amazon), all profanity not allowed on FCC-regulated TV networks (i.e. Screen Junkies, Cracked), censoring "fuck" but not "shit" or other words (React), channels that censor profanity in the titles of their videos, but not in the videos themselves (i.e. kmlkmljkl, Explosm), or channels that go scott-free in the freedom of speech they're allowed to have on the platform (i.e. Anthony Griffy, Channel Awesome). There are also channels that have trouble deciding whether or not to have censored profanity in their videos and risk demonetization as a a result, such as CollegeHumor, Funny Or Die, & Lenarr Young.
  • YouTube's current rule regarding profanity is that any uncensored use in the first 15 seconds of a video will automatically demonitize it. Because of this, some channels will censor profanities only some of the times they are used, and leave them uncensored at least once (akin to PG-13 movies being allowed one or two uses of "fuck").
  • In September 2020, YouTube began censoring most profanities in its automatic captions by replacing them with "[ __ ]", or in some cases, skipping them entirely (e.g. "What the fuck are you doing?" might be transcribed as, "what the are you doing"). YouTube officially states that this is in case the captions incorrectly transcribe a non-profane word as a profanity. While the censoring can be disabled, it can only be done by the creator of the video and not the viewer, and it has to be done by unticking a box buried in their channel's advanced settings. As one can expect, almost nobody bothers to do this. Many hard-of-hearing users and creators have criticized this decision as ableist, as the censoring does not affect the video's audio. The captions' "naughty word list" is also questionable. Words that are censored include, besides the obvious ones: "whore", "slut", "bastard", "midget", "retard(ed)", "spastic", and perhaps most egregious, "moron", "sissy", "cripple(d)", and "tramp" (even when referring to Lady and the Tramp). Words that are not censored include: "shitty" (though "shit" by itself is), "horseshit", "bitching" (though "bitch" by itself is), "damn" and "goddamn", "ass" (though "asshole" is), "piss(ed)", "hell", "pussy", and "dick" (understandable since it's also a male name). Despite "moron" being censored, any synonyms such as "idiot" and even "dumbass" are not. This has also resulted in certain homophones being censored, such as "caulk". In foreign languages, profanities are not censored in their native language, but are censored if the user uses the auto-translate feature to show them in English. As of the automatic captions adding proper punctuation in 2025, profanities are not censored if they are used in a sentence inside quotation marks, but are still censored otherwise.
• Repeatedly Used on This Very Wiki: sh*t, f*ck, and f*cking are frequently seen.^note Although in most cases, this is because it's a quotation from somewhere else that censored the word exactly as shown.
• Facebook tries to automatically flag certain things, such as drug-related terms and threats of violence. The flagging system sometimes misunderstands normal discussions and flags those as well, due to them accidentally containing terms the system looks for. Users get around this not only via creative phrasing and deliberate misspellings, but also by replacing individual letters with asterisks, which doesn't hide anything from actual users, but does allow those users to discuss helping their friend M*lly make m*shr*om soup and w*ed her garden without repercussions.
• Tumblr users will sometimes replace single letters in w*rds with asterisks, or put some number of sl//ash/es between letters. Although the intended terms are still obvious to readers, this helps to prevent these posts from appearing in searches, with the slashes in particular often being used when referencing or complaining about communities one wants to avoid interacting with.
• Twitter:
  • Users will commonly use very nominal censoring of certain terms or individuals when mentioned in negative terms (e.g. "the people on here obsessed with K*m*l* H*rr*s scare me") because the goal isn't to obscure what is being read and understood, but to prevent malicious or insufferable Single-Issue Wonk posters from searching the name and hassling the user. Twitter doesn't block out searching for asterisks, though, so sufficiently determined termsearchers can still find your wild accusations about the sexual immorality of their favourite comic book artist or whatever it is. Because of this, another common technique is to use sla/shes to div/ide up wo/rds like t/his - the slash prevents Twitter's programming from being able to search for the word at all.
  • Twitter bans users for inappropriate content, like threatening people or encouraging self-harm and suicide, but doesn't use particularly sophisticated means to work this out. For example, responding "I am going to kill you" as a Lame Pun Reaction has led to users losing control of their accounts, as well as users sincerely describing their traumatic experiences as rape victims or their struggles with suicidal ideation. Users will sometimes use asterisks in these sensitive words in order to signal that they don't mean them as threats. (Or, naturally, to get their genuine harassment past the censors.)
• This trope is why GameFAQs requires you to fully censor illegal words or just not use them at all; partial censoring, or a "censor bypass" as the site calls it, is a Terms of Use violation and is grounds for disciplinary action.
• Notably averted on fantasy and sci-fi site Elfwood, where certain gestures (the finger, the shocker) and the Three Big bad words (shit, fuck, and cunt) have always been banned, including partially censored instances. The rule is, it has to be omitted or completely censored. Saying "but sh*t stands for sand" won't get you a pass.
• Supposedly Leet Lingo was originally invented to bypass the automatic profanity filters on internet forums without actually censoring anything.
• Due to being a collaborative series, the SCP Foundation has some inconsistent standards on censorship. To give an example, there's a low number of articles using the standard "[REDACTED]" or black boxes to censor swears, or even specifically reading "[EXPLETIVE REDACTED]" while others leave curse words intact. This is especially evident in the joke SCP page: One title reads "A Steaming Pile of ████"^note This isn't Censored for Comedy either; the joke SCP is an actual pile of horse feces even though a few lines above it is "WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT THING."
• Zoom and Microsoft Teams censor profanities in their live caption feature, although the user can disable it on the latter.

• The Angry Video Game Nerd demonstrated this hypocrisy in his video on Action 52.
• Todd in the Shadows tries to show that even he doesn't have any N-Word Privileges during his review Kanye West and Jay-Z's "Niggas in Paris". The first time he had to say the name of the song, he stopped himself and asked for "Ni***as in Paris" to show up on screen. At the end of the review, he almost says it again, but stops once more and points to the bottom of the screen. It now says "Niggas in P***s". He sighs in disappointment. "What the hell do I pay you people for?"
• Adam The Woo's theme song, used at the beginning of most of his videos, has the last line "Awwwwww shit, Son" censored in the on-screen lyrics, but not in the audio. This is also a Precision F-Strike, since his videos rarely include profanity otherwise.
• Alexa Nikolas is very inconsistent on censoring words on her YouTube channel, where she mostly speaks about abuse in the entertainment industry. She will intentionally avoid saying words like "sexual abuse" and "pedophile", verbally substituting them for "S.A." and "PDF file", respectively. She will also sometimes spell words such as "boobs" instead of saying them outright. However, she has no problem saying "fuck" in her videos, and they are not always bleeped out. Sometimes, she will say it in two consecutive sentences and the first will be bleeped out but not the second, and she leaves "shit" uncensored more often than not. Also, when Alexa shows screenshots of articles or Emails, profanities and her "trigger words" are not censored in the text, but she will avoid saying them when reading the content aloud.
• JonTron once did a video segment entitled: "Shit That Fucks Games Up".
• Parodied in Source Wars: Day of Defeat vs. The Hidden: at the beginning, the hosts mention that some viewers had problems with the uncensored swearing in the first episode, and so have their technical staff ready to censor their swears live. Said technical staff is shown to only consist of a sleepy old man, who either misses bleeping out swears entirely or fails to do so until a few seconds after they're uttered.
  Frank Futter: [The Hidden]'s off to the middle flag now, but he can't capture it because the point requires two people! You have got to be kidding me again!
  Turd Schnugel: Didn't we think of this shit before the game started? [beep]
• In Benzaie's review of Hunter, he makes disparaging comments about games which Hunter beat to the punch, with increasingly nonsensical censorship.
  Benzaie: I'm sorry, Solid Snake, but you can s*ck my c*ck!
  Benzaie: I'm sorry, Splinter Cell, but you can suck my c*ck!
  Benzaie: I'm sorry, Red Faction, but you can suck m* cock!
  Benzaie: I'm sorry, GTAIV, but you can suck my ass! **
• A series of four Norwegian, humoristic YouTube videos called Fauskeråneren^note Hard to translate. Fauske is a town in Northern Norway. "Råning" is a motor- and car-based subculture where the focus is driving rather than the actual vehicle. uses this as a Running Gag; the main character (a stereotypical råner (see the note) being interviewed) swears quite a bit, and the bleeping sound never manages to cover it.
• Parodied in Third Rate Gamer's Yoshi's Island "review". Certain words like "shit" and "fuck" are partially bleeped out, usually in a way that makes it really obvious what the swear was. However, words like "dickwaffles" and "crap" are kept.
• This video from The Best Show In The Universe has one censor bar have the word "FUCK" written on it.
• A fanmade version of Tim Minchin's "The Pope Song" tries to bleep out every single use of the word "fuck", mostly to parody VEVO and its downright ridiculous attempts to censor things. It manages to get most of the main lines (which to its credit is no easy task), but in a few cases bleeps "mother" out, meaning that there is at least one "*bleep*fucker" in the song. The backing vocals are also left unbleeped.
• This Yogscast playthrough of Trouble in Terrorist Town purposefully employs bad or pointless censorship for humour, bleeping out any rude words for one segment and then failing to do so for the next, with Pyrion objecting to Sjin calling him a *bleep* and Lewis Brindley requesting that they "keep it PG" despite not marketing for kids in the first place.
• Bart Baker has a series of videos called Butthurt Comments where he reads butthurt comments on his music video parodies from offended fans of the artist or song being parodied. Baker reads the comments aloud while a screenshot of the comment appears on the screen. Any profanities in the comments are left uncensored in the screenshots but are bleeped out in the audio when Baker reads them.
• One Retsupurae had slowbeef, Diabetus, and Proteus give a Let's Player grief due to his odd and strange placement for his Censor Bleeps leading to this trope. Most of the time the censor noises were just loud and obnoxious, but despite this allegedly being a "censored" video, a few fucks still slipped through in between car alarms and glass shattering noises.
• The French-Canadian series "Les 2 Minutes du Peuple" has a skit where Georges Brassens is singing about a porn movie, with every racy word bleeped out by bizarre sound effects. Until the last verse, where the crude language is the only thing that's not censored.
• Buzzfeed's Fast Food Fried Chicken Taste Test. When Keith starts rapping about fried chicken, the line "We're boys who like fucking fried chicken!" has the word 'fucking' censored in the subtitles, but the bleep plays over the word instead of censoring it in the actual video, leaving it clearly audible. (It was most likely an editing goof.)
• Scare PewDiePie was almost banned in Singapore, but received an M18 rating after the bleeping/muting of the phrase 'Jesus fucking Christ'. Several other exclamations of "Jesus!" and 'fuck' were left intact, but the two together were deemed unacceptable.
• The sing-along lyrics to Randy Rainbow's "Desperate Cheeto" say "****ing", but you can clearly hear him pronounce the F before the bleep starts.
• Formula 1: In his 2016 Grill the Grid appearance Nico Hulkenberg responds to getting the time wrong for his pole qualifying lap time in Brazil with "Anyway it doesn't matter, it was a f-bleep-ing good lap." making it quite clear what word they'd bleeped out.
• On Geek & Sundry's Co-Optitude, swear words uttered by the hosts are always censored. However, the editors frequently fail to pay attention to the dialogue of the games that they are actually playing...
• joshscorcher prefers to censor his swear words. For fun, the sound he uses to censor out his cursing is Fluttershy's soft "Yay!" from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, except for his "Top Ten Konami Fails" video, where he instead used Jim Sterling's contemptuous utterance of the word "Konami".
• The Angry Joe Show very liberally uses angry swearing during particularly strong moments ("You dun' fucked it up!" is practically a catchphrase), and a Running Gag developed of completely failed censoring, usually by censoring the incorrect word (usually something really innocuous instead of actual f-bombs), but sometimes it not going all the way.
  Joe: FUU—(beeeeeeeeeeep)—UUUUUCK!
• This trope can happen in YouTube Poops when one source has censored cursing and another is uncensored.
  • The now-deleted YouTube Poop "AVGN Plays Pingas #1 on the Shit" bleeps out the word "fuck" when used as a verb, but not when it is used as a noun.
  Nerd: I guess you can [BLEEP] with it on your lap, or on the FUCK!
  • "Trapped in a YouTube Poop" has most uses of "cock" uncensored, but it gets bleeped out whenever it's used with "shit" and "fuck", both of which are always censored in the video.
  • In "YTP: Futurama" by Overlord Of Darkness, the word "cock" isn't censored in the audio, but the onscreen subtitles are censored. However, in another video by the same pooper called "[YTP Special] Rick and Morty Trip Balls", the inverse occurs with the word "dick": it is censored in the audio but uncensored in the subtitles.
  • In the four-person collab "YouTube Poop: Wrong Pope Eel's Audience Dehydrator", the final entry is censored, unlike the other entries, due to being made by DaThings, a pooper known for clean videos.
• Richter Overtime's video discussing corpse01, a model in Half-Life 2 whose face is sourced from a photo of someone whose face was burned off in real life, shows the in-game texture uncensored but has to blur out the real photo it's sourced from.
• Game Changer: In "Sam Says," Lou's audio is partially bleeped out when he claims that the official opinion of Dropout as a company is that a certain famous murder suspect is innocent and "whoever killed those people" is still out there, making the name impossible to hear to protect the company from any legal liability. No effort is taken to censor his lips, though, so you can clearly tell that the person in question is O. J. Simpson.
• Philosophy Tube: In "Beauty in Ugly Times," Abigail attempts to discuss the plot of Lolita but has to do so in a way that won't trip YouTube's content filters. She decides to do so by showing the "real" words she means in big letters onscreen while a voice reads out a more family-friendly alternative.
  Abigail: Humbert decides to...
  Narrator: (the text on screen reads "kidnap Dolores") Go on a lovely holiday.
  Abigail: ...and travels across America with her...
  Narrator: (the text on screen reads "committing sex crimes") Playing Animal Crossing.
• Exploring Lost Wads: Michael's swearing is covered up with Doomguy's grunts. However, the grunt typically lasts for such a short amount of time that it's blatantly obvious what Michael is saying, and text shown on-screen is never censored.

• [adult swim]'s Standards and Practices seem to only allow a certain number of uses of 'shit' in a TV-14 rated show, explaining why multiple episodes of shows like Rick and Morty and Mike Tyson Mysteries will often say 'shit' once or twice uncensored and have it bleeped for every other occurrence in the episode.
  • In most of Season 4 of Rick and Morty, when characters say "eat my ass", the word "ass" is bleeped in the televised version. In "The Vat of Acid Episode", after one person says this censored phrase, Johnny Carson then says "I did not know that ass was on the menu," uncensored. At the end of the same scene, the line "Looks like I'll be eating ass flambé," is poorly censored. Starting with the very next episode, "Childrick of Mort", the phrase was allowed uncensored on TV, except for a scene in "A Rickconvenient Mort" where Summer and Rick use the word "ass" in this context repeatedly and sexually.
  • In the televised version of "Never Ricking Morty", whenever the phrase "cum gutters" is said, only the "C" sound is bleeped. When the phrase was said again in "Full Meta Jackrick", this was inverted, with the "um" sound being bleeped.
  • In Momma Named Me Sheriff, strong profanity is only partially bleeped out, so you get to hear "fu-" and "di-".
  • Some shows, such as Lazor Wulf, have censored onscreen text even in the versions with uncensored audio. In one scene in the broadcast version of the episode "Where You From?", the word "shit" is censored in the audio but not onscreen.
  • One version of the Season 2 finale of Tender Touches has the word "shitting" bleeped out when someone says that he enjoys shitting himself, but then it isn't bleeped when someone else replies that she also enjoys that.
  • Similar to the Rick and Morty example above, the Robot Chicken skit with Popeye characters trying to appeal to modern teens by getting into the trend of eating ass suddenly has the word "ass" bleeped when talking about eating ass.
• In the As Told by Ginger episode "Carl and Maude", a character suddenly dies onscreen, but Never Say "Die" is played straight in the dialogue. Ginger nervously asks her mother asks if the person is "napping", to which she responds uneasily, "Somehow, I really don't think so." However, when the character comes back as a ghost during a Halloween Episode, death-related words are used directly.
• The first season of Total Drama was largely censored in America. Replacing words like "crap" and "suck" with "snot" and "stink." Interestingly enough though, both words managed to slip by in the episode "Not Quite Famous" when Bridgette says, "Oh crap!" after destroying Courtney's violin, and when Chris says "and the Killer Bass are totally sucking so far!" Even more baffling is that Bridgette saying, "we already know Tyler sucks," was still changed to "we already know Tyler stinks," in the very same episode. Lindsay's freakout at Heather later in the season was censored as well, which is utterly baffling, since the original version was just a long censor bleep. The US version changes the long bleep to an awkward string of very mild insults.
  • This trope was averted on Netflix, which uses the censored American versions, but censored even further: Bridgette's "Oh crap!" line was replaced with, "Oh no!", and Chris saying, "the Killer Bass are totally sucking so far" was changed to, "the Killer Bass are totally losing so far." The trope is played straight with the subtitles, however, which shows the dialogue from the original versions.
• Any clips of Hazbin Hotel posted on Amazon Prime's social media (the platform that hosts the show), including ads, have hardcoded subtitles that censor all profanities, but the audio is left uncensored. The show's own social media, for the most part, does not censor anything in any form; in some cases, they actually emphasize the swears in their clips' subtitles by coloring them red.
  • One exception with the show's social media is their posts of the song "VOX DEI" from the episode "Silenced". The line "'Cause I'm the furor" is displayed on screen as "'Cause I'm the f***!" despite the audio being uncensored. This caused debate among fans on whether the word is "furor" or "führer". Composer Sam Haft confirmed that the word is officially "furor", but the Double Entendre with "führer" is intentional. When streaming the episode itself, the closed captioning displays "'Cause I'm the furor" uncensored.
• South Park:
  • In the broadcast version of "It Hits the Fan", the two instances of "fuck" that don't have an "-ing" at the end are only partially bleeped so that you can hear "fu-". This is presumably to assure the viewers that all the uses of "shit" in the episode are uncensored.
  • The episode "Le Petit Tourette" left nearly all the vulgarities spewed by Cartman throughout the entire episode uncensored... except for "fuck", which was only used once.
  • The syndicated episodes are censored further, but in ways more pertaining to this trope. A strong example occurs in the syndicated edit of "Cartoon Wars, Part One," where Mr. Garrison originally said "jack off" while writing the same words on the chalkboard. His dialogue now says "jack ***," while the chalkboard now says "**** off."
  • When "The Pandemic Special" premiered in Canada on Much, it was uncensored with the odd exception of Randy’s line “The fuck is a pangolin?” This version of the episode was also uploaded to the Much website. Later, when Much aired a new version that was altered to replace the "Super Best Friends" lunchbox picture, the language was completely uncensored.
• Averted in Family Guy, where not only are swears bleeped, but so are certain non-swear words linking to them, such as the "you" in "fuck you" often being bleeped as well (unless the character who's saying it is offscreen).
  • While middle fingers are usually blurred out on FOX airings, Cleveland got away with doing it uncensored in "Deep Throats" after Brian didn't stop his cab for him, though it was brief and not as noticeable since it was shown through Brian's rear windshield as he drove away. Adult Swim airings usually left them uncensored.
  • This was played straight in the censored version of the Season 5 episode "The Tan Aquatic with Steve Zissou", where "goddamn" was indeed bleeped as "[bleep] damn". In other episodes, however, it was either bleeped/cut out entirely, shortened to just "damn", or replaced with a different phrase (For example, in "FOX-y lady", Peter yelling "God damn it!" was changed to "Son of a bitch!")
  • Played for laughs when the FCC decides to censor real life in "PTV", bleeping people with an air horn, for example when Peter is talking to Lois:
    Peter: You know, you're lucky you're good at (air horn) my (air horn). You know what I mean, when you (air horn) lubed up (air horn) toothpaste in my (air horn) cherry (air horn) Episcopalian (air horn) extension cord (air horn) wetness (air horn) with a parking ticket. That is the best!
  • The word "masturbate" is also censored in some episodes, but not others. Some episodes also had a limit on how many times they can say the word, such as "Barely Legal". However, starting with Season 9, FOX no longer edits it.
  • On the DVD release of Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story (a film that would later be edited into a three-part episode to air as part of the series), profanity is bleeped out by default, but an optional uncensored audio track is also included. The subtitles on the DVD change all the bleeped words to other words, regardless of which audio track is selected. "Fuck" is written as "darn" (in the context of "fuck you"), "freaking", or "do" (as in sexually), "shit" is written as "crap", and "bullshit" is written as simply "bull". "Screw" is also written as "darn" despite not being bleeped even on the censored audio track. On the TV version that airs as part of the regular series, the bleeps are longer than on the DVD, bleeping the entire words instead of only the vowel sounds.
• Space Ghost Coast to Coast: In one episode, Space Ghost calls his guest an asshole. The thing is, the bleep is between the syllables of the word, so it really doesn't cover anything up.
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force:
  • The series had a case like this in a Halloween-themed episode:
  Willie Nelson: Uh... What are you doing here?
  Carl: I live here, ass(bleep)!
  • Also occurs in The Movie, in which one of the Mooninites' uses of "shit" is censored despite the film being R-rated and the same word being uncensored every other time. Carl also utters "fuck" during the Insanoflex scene, and it is bleeped, but so quietly that anyone can hear the word unimpeded.
• The Simpsons
  • At some point around season 17 at the latest, it became taboo to show any character's bare butt. Apart from The Simpsons usually airing near Seth MacFarlane shows which lack this rule, there's other reasons why this doesn't make much sense. Earlier episodes occasionally re-air and are not edited to fit this rule, and in the season eighteen episode "Little Big Girl", Bart has an Imagine Spot with a giant gold statue of him mooning — completely uncovered. So apparently it's okay to show one's rear as long as it's depicted in a gold (keep in mind many characters in this show, including Bart, are yellow) statue that resembles them completely. The season seven episode "The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular" ended in "hardcore nudity", and featured a montage of all the previous times characters had been naked, including many of the aforementioned butts. This too remains uncensored on reruns. In recent episodes, they've even gotten away with showing cheeks on more than a few ocassions.
  • In "Homer The Whopper", the word "masturbate" was bleeped despite the show using it uncensored twice in "The Father, The Son, and the Holy Guest Star".
  • Parodied in the episode "Pygmoelian", where Moe gets plastic surgery and becomes the male lead in a soap opera. When he thinks his character will be killed off, he gets help from Homer to spoil months worth of plot lines on the air. During this scene, one of the producers says "What the f[bleep]ge?" "Fudge" is a family-friendly swear replacement.
  • The Russian dub has no problem with the depiction of alcohol, as long as characters aren't shown drinking it. The second before the bottle or can touches their lips, it's suddenly very crudely overlaid with a carton of milk.
• Similar to the Simpsons example but more of a Double Standard than a censorship crackdown later on in its life, King of the Hill will not show a woman's ass. This is obvious during the episode "Sug Night" — Hank and Bill's butts are in clear view while they are naked, but in Hank's dream Nancy is once censored by a suspiciously held pack of buns (which is moved out of the way when she turns). Already odd, later in the nude beach, there's a shot showing Hank and Peggy from behind. Peggy is covered by a flower, while a hummingbird flies in a few seconds later over Hank. And there's one-shot nudist characters Becky and Mandy from the same beach scene, who are always either behind brush or only shown above the waist.
• When TNN/Spike TV had its short-lived adult animation block (including Gary the Rat, Stripperella and Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon"), a fake rating screen would come up before the show with the announcement, "The following program is rated CFFA: Cartoons for f(blip)kin' adults. Hide the kids."
• In a case of double standards, US Cartoon Network subjects The Amazing World of Gumball to harsher censorship than its own shows because it's an import. Examples listed here.
• This was a reoccurring problem with the poorly edited version of Daria that was broadcast on TeenNick (then known as The N). Words like 'damn', 'hell', and even 'sucker' were inconsistently edited, sometimes with one instance being left in and one being cut in the exact same scene. Furthermore, fans were upset about the trims for mild profanities, innuendoes, and sometimes mature subject matter when Degrassi: The Next Generation was airing on the same block with no such edits.
• The Legend of Korra is a pretty good example of Never Say "Die" being stretched to its absolute limit; it’s a relatively mature show with a fair amount of violence and death, some of it quite brutal (explosions, fatal electrocution, etc.), but the characters rarely ever use words like 'die' or 'kill', instead defaulting to the softest euphemisms they can find. By the third season it becomes almost laughable, as the show was allowed to depict a woman being graphically asphyxiated to death onscreen by the Big Bad, but apparently saying that she died would just be too traumatic for the kiddies, so everyone only ever describes a vicious murder as someone being 'taken down'.
• A non-profane example is Played for Laughs in Star Trek: Lower Decks. While describing a classified mission that she took part in, Tendi says that she'll leave out some details...leading to a flashback where everyone but her and Ransom have censor bars over their eyes, and bleeps are inserted at random and worthless spots, such as mention of their encounter with "Rom[BEEP]ulans."
• Danger Mouse: Played for laughs in the episode "One Of Our Stately Homes Is Missing." The Duke of Bedbug's mansion has been stolen, so DM says he'll need help from BLEEP (the Building Location and Emergency Extradition Platoon).
  Penfold: Eh?
  Colonel K: Organization called BLEEP, Penfold.
  Penfold: Oh, go on. You can tell me. I'm a trustee.
  DM: Penfold, it's BLEEP.
  Penfold: All right, then. I shan't tell you where I hid the cornflakes!

• Joe Morgan once wrote the following in Sports Illustrated.
  Joe Torre met with George Steinbrenner for a nice lunch in Tampa the other day, and I'm sure at some point the subject probably turned to the Yankees. And George, I'd bet, at some point looked at his manager and said, "#$!&@* the heck?"
  • This led to "fuck the heck?" becoming a meme in some circles.
• Infamously, G4's broadcasting of E3 2011 censored "Mr. Caffeine"'s profanity-laden spiel - but the wrong parts of it. Generally, when Mr. Caffeine said "shit", the actual swear word would be uncensored but would be immediately followed by two or three seconds of censor bleep. The same thing used to happen very frequently in the world of Professional Wrestling when the concept of doing everything live with only a 7-second delay was still new and the timing wasn't yet practiced. It happens far less often now, but the TV audience will hear "I think he's a big pile of shit an——-four weeks ago!" while any later rebroadcast will have the censoring put in properly in post-production.
• The one time where Fred Durst from Limp Bizkit was shown in the audience at a WWE event and he flipped off the camera. The production guys tried to censor this by cutting the audio but leaving the actual picture untouched^note As is usually the case when fans make obscene gestures towards the camera during wrestling/sporting events Durst (who was there as a ticket-buying fan, not as a guest of WWE) was ejected from the building by security.
• Because of Japan's rather strict censorship laws, doujins cannot depict uncensored genitalia. Nobody really believes these laws are necessary anymore, but actually trying to change them would be political suicide. As a result, most hentai artists put in censorship that is quite nominal and hides absolutely nothing, placed in such a way as to not really censor what's going on in the slightest. The Censor Boxes are often absurdly tiny and only hide negligible amounts of what they are supposedly censoring, showing as much as possible if it's not completely pixellated or smeared in photoshop.
• On an April 2014 All In with Chris Hayes, Bill Maher is censored asking if he can use the word "asshole", and then immediately afterwards manages to get away with "hole of an ass".
• Documents in Michael Cohen's 2018 trial referred to one of his associates as "Individual 1". The attempt to obscure the identity of "Individual 1" as Donald Trump was rendered moot by descriptions such as "elected President of the United States in 2016".
  • In a similar vein, a federal investigation into the collapse and implosion of the OceanGate Titan submersible redacts the name of one interview subject, who begins with "Well, I am sure you are familiar with my film Titanic…", and later adds, "I had been an avid diver since I was in my teens and I made a film called The Abyss in 1988, which was released in 1989."
• The Polish law makes it so that the people accused of crimes get their faces and names anonymized in media, and in some cases the end result is this trope:
  • Sometimes the anonymization consists of slapping a black bar on their eyes and nothing else, which obviously doesn't work if the accused is famous enough.
  • The crimes of relatives of famous people are often reported as "Jan F., relative of Józef Famousperson".
  • One thumbnail of an article reporting the detainment of "Henryk K." became a minor meme, because it depicted the detained in front of the logo of his meat processing company. Said company, Henryk Kania, is named after him.
• One story goes that a contestant on a live TV show let out a long tirade of swear words, with the censor team dutifully censoring each one with a bleep of appropriate length. The contestant then cheerfully informed the host that the beeps spelled out another swear word, in Morse code.
• The Excalibur resort in Las Vegas hosts nightly karaoke with a strictly-enforced rule that profanities cannot be used on stage. Singers are urged either to replace them with other words or just not sing the bad words at all. However, they are still shown uncensored on the several screens that display the song lyrics to sing along to. They will also still be sung by the track's backup vocals.
  • The inverse of this is also true with certain karaoke systems that censor profanities in the onscreen lyrics, but nothing is stopping the singer from singing them into the microphone, unless the venue has a no-profanity rule like the Excalibur.
• Words that need to be censored for non-profane reasons, placed next to swear words, can look like this to those unfamiliar with the totally reasonable explanation involved. See the time-honored Jewish practice of getting around the prohibition on destroying the name of g-d by not writing it out or the newer strategy of censoring the name of a celebrity or piece of art you’re insulting so it doesn’t turn up in fans’ search results. G-d damn St@r W@r$…