People Break Down The Dumbest Things They Ever Saw Censored

Censorship is all around us. Censorship is ⬛⬛⬛⬛ and when ⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️ can be ⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️, except in cases where ⬛️⬛️⬛️ is ⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️.

Frustrating, right?

But not all censoring is malicious in its intent or inherently harmful.

Public sector censorship can be related to national security or a symptom of fascism. Private sector censorship can be to protect industry secrets or to hide information to avoid public backlash.

Most adults engage in some form of ccensorship when it comes to children.

They may censor their own language, use parental controls to censor images, websites, or entertainment content or it may be employed to push a political or religious agenda onto other people's children.

And sometimes, it's just plain stupid.

Reddit user RobIson240YT asked:

"What's the dumbest thing you've seen censored?"

Lesson Learned

"In high school French class, I was given a photocopied excerpt from David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day to read for class by the teacher. There is a single reference to the author having a 'boyfriend' that had been whited-out during the photocopying."

"The book was available in the school library, uncensored."

"This one specific teacher was against the mere idea of homosexuals, but, apparently, found enough importance in this chapter of a book by an openly gay man that she had photocopied the chapter."

"Then she made sure to obviously omit a single word."

~ Malfoy657

Penal Code

"Many years ago, on Animal Planet, at 7 o’clock there was a show about elephants, including mating and giving birth, plus how elephants fight off a concerted attack by lions trying to have a baby elephant over for dinner, nothing censored."

Giphy

"The following program at 8 o’clock was about gazelles, also including giving birth (not censored,) lions getting dinner (also not censored) as well as mating, but the gazelle’s penis was censored.

"Why‽‽"

"One, the previous show censored absolutely nothing. And two, if censoring anything, then why not the blood and gore‽‽"

~ GrumpyOldGeezer_4711

It's Pronounced /skuhn·thawp/

"In 1996, AOL's profanity filter blocked people from the British town of Scunthorpe from creating accounts because 'Scunthorpe' contains the word 'c*nt'."

~ paraworldblue

"This also happened with cable company NTL, which—before they were bought by Virgin—was the UK's largest cable provider."

"When NTL bought out Diamond Cable and inherited their customer base, the new customer support software also had a 'bad word' filter for signing up new customers."

"Scunthorpe, England was one of Diamond Cable's larger markets and suddenly no new customers could sign up."

"It got fixed pretty quickly, but it happens often enough that the phenomenon has its own Wikipedia page: The Scunthorpe Problem."

~ Leiawen

The Algorithm

"The word 'unalive' being used in place of words like death, suicide, kill, or murder."

"It's dumb enough that Tiktok censors content with those words in the first place, but it's a whole other level of dumb when people carry it with them to other sites like Reddit that don't even have those policies."

"It seems like a lot of kids have missed the context that 'unalive' only exists to get around idiotic censorship and have instead misinterpreted it to mean that the words are actually problematic and that censoring them is actually a good thing."

"It's not. Just say the f*cking words."

~ paraworldblue

Tooting Their Own Horn

"I saw Blazing Saddles on some small network TV channel. The whole thing was heavily edited, of course, but the worst one was the scene where the cowboys are sitting around a camp fire, eating beans, and farting."

"For some reason, the network took out all the farting. So it was just a bunch of dudes sitting at a fire, silent, leaning over every couple of seconds."

"It was so weird."

~ TrademarkedLobster

Giphy

"That sounds like an old edit I saw. They removed the farts, muffled 'Schtupp' to sound like 'Shhh', but left in all the racial slurs."

"The 80s could be weird sometimes."

~ ermghoti

Well, Sh*t

"When Instagram pages post news on shootings, they always say sh*t instead of shot, which I never understand."

~ OLKEUK

"I would also sh*t myself in a shooting."

~ Spram2

"Shooting changed to Sh**ting, because all I see is 💩💩 (sh*tting)."

~ lockwolf

Sharpies On Point

"In high school, a teacher wanted his class to read One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It’s a classic about a prisoner in a Russian Gulag."

"But some parents objected to the language. They were afraid their kid would be scarred for life if they read any profanity."

"The compromise was to to come up with a list of words, by page and line number, that had to be removed. A handful of students who had turned 18 were each given a stack of books and Sharpie."

"When the books were handed out to the class, it became a game to see who could figure out what each blacked out word was."

~ JustSomeGuy_56

Giphy

"Scarred by profanity, but not the account of the horrors of a gulag?"

~ Infinityskull

Free The Nipple

"Was watching a medical show once, and they were showing a male patient getting pectoral implants. Only the chest area was shown."

"They showed the whole chest, unedited, but as soon as an implant was inserted on each side, the nipples were immediately pixelated."

"The very same nipple that was fine when the chest was flatter."

~ Rogue_N_PeasantSlave

"I remember watching a documentary covering the transition for a transgender person. They showed some of the operations."

"With the part of the breast augmentation, they showed the chest being sliced, and then the breast implants being slid in. The second the implants were in they started pixelating the nipples."

"My eyes nearly rolled out my goddam head."

~ ExxInferis

Shena****ns

"On a Jaguar/Land Rover forum of all places, I once stumbled across the word 'Shenanigans' auto censored as 'Shena****ns'."

"I feel like someone had to create a blacklist of forbidden wordswhen creating the site, but went overboard."

~ Madougatee

Profanity > Violence

"I still think it is funny when a horror, crime, action movie or war movie is televised and bad words are cut out but the violence is still intact."

"The same applies to nudity, but as this is less common in film than swear words and can usually be cut, it feels different than seeing a clearly dubbed swear word. Trust me, I think a kid will be less traumatized hearing a word they know than seeing someone die."

"Also I get that swear words are not accepted, but 'f*ck' and 'frick' are just synonyms, so you are just teaching kids to swear in a way that doesn't get them in trouble."

"For me, Goodfellas is always my go to."

Giphy

"The amount of censorship involved in putting it on tv is so absurd, but so much of the violence is maintained without any edits."

"It is like TV executives think that swearing is the real issue with the characters in the film."

~ teachmeyourstory

Life Imitates Art

"I'm a former teacher."

"I had some parents successfully block me from teaching Fahrenheit 451 to high school juniors."

~ classroomcomedian

What's In A Name?

"There's the guy named Nasser, who wanted to use his own name as his gaming handle in Warhammer III."

"It was censored to remove the word 'ass', so the game turned his name into 'N***er'—which looks so much worse."

~ DisgruntlesAnonymous

"Got an image saved somewhere of that dude named Nasser who got part of his name censored. The censorship really makes it look worse."

~ kombatminipig

OK, NYT

"The New York Times had a style guide that used homosexual instead of gay."

"So Memphis Grizzlies basketball player Rudy Gay's name got autocorrected to Rudy Homosexual."

~ enad58

Alan Cumming

"A website reviewing the movie X-Men: X2."

"When commenting on the character Nightcrawler, the actor who played the part, Alan Cumming, was written Alan C*****g."

Giphy

"Wut‽‽ Dude, it's his name!"

~ Professional_Egg_858

What's the most ridiculous censorship you've seen?