Bleep censor

A bleep censor is the replacement of a profanity or classified information with a beep sound (usually a  1000 Hz tone ) in television and radio.

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

On closed caption subtitling, bleeped words are usually represented by the phrase "(bleep)", sometimes the phrase "[expletive]" or "[censored]", occasionally hyphens (e.g. f—k f---), and sometimes asterisks (e.g. ****, f***, f**k, f*ck, f#@k or f#@%), remaining faithful to the audio track. Where open captions are used (generally in instances where the speaker is not easily understood), a blank is used where the word is bleeped. Occasionally, bleeping is not reflected in the captions, allowing the unedited dialogue to be seen. Sometimes, a "black bar" can be seen for closed caption bleep, or pixelization.

Bleeping is normally only used in unscripted programs – documentaries, radio features, panel games etc. – since scripted drama and comedy are designed to suit the time of broadcast. In the case of comedies, most bleeping may be for humorous purposes.

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