Censorshit
Although “when censors go bad” sounds like it will be some sort of crap documentary due to appear on Channel 5 at any moment now, it’s is always somewhere between farcical, comical, and tragic when attempts to censor something cock up badly.
For example, The American Family Association don’t like the word ‘gay’. They instead prefer to use the word ‘homosexual’, presumably as ‘gay’ doesn’t sound disapproving enough. That’s all very well up to a point, but as the Washington Post pointed out when quoting the report from the American Family Association, it does cause problems when you encounter someone like the sprinter Tyson Gay…
Homosexual qualified for his first Summer Games team and served notice he’s certainly someone to watch in Beijing.
“It means a lot to me,” the 25-year-old Homosexual said. “I’m glad my body could do it, because now I know I have it in me.”
American Family Association report, as quoted on the Washington Post Blog
And now we’ve got the iTunes store getting quite upset about certain words which may cause offence. Words like ‘hot’, ‘teen’, and ‘pussy’ — which admittedly when appearing together look a bit dubious — have been censored.
As the BBC points out, this means we have songs by J****y Cash, we have Nirvana’s classic ‘Smells like T**n spirit’ and even a recording of The Owl and the P***ycat.
Now I can understand that the iTunes store is reluctant to show explicit song titles on it’s site for fear of offending people and so blanks them out, but this rather misses the point. If kids can still purchase the songs with the offensive lyrics, then you’ve not protected them at all — you’ve in fact made money from facilitating their purchase of offensive songs. If you don’t want kids to see offensive titled songs, introduce some sort of age checking — allow those over 18 access to see and purchase these songs if they want, but don’t allow youngsters the facility.
Because I am more likely to get offended by the idea that I need to be ‘protected’; that I am somehow going to be corrupted, offended, or sent into a state of shock by seeing or hearing some word. It’s like when you hear a song on the radio and it has quiet bits in it where they’ve blanked out the swear words. If you don’t think it’s appropriate don’t play the expletive deleted song, rather than playing some butchered version of it.
I don’t find sexual references, or strong language offensive. I do find homophobia and racism offensive. Other people will have different beliefs, and may have different tolerance levels for different things. Still, at least I don’t live in an area which has ‘the Scunthorpe Problem’:
The problem was named after an incident in 1996 in which America Online’s dirty-word filter prevented residents from the town of Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire, England from creating accounts with AOL, because the town’s name contains the substring…Wikipedia: The Scunthorpe Problem
As the article goes on to point out, residents of Penistone, of Lightwater, and people searching for information about the footballer Nwankwo Kanu have all encountered similar problems. Also, the term ‘socialist’ has been blocked in many cases for containing the string ‘cialis’.
Now I’m not in favour of censorship in the first place (although I do, for example, try to avoid listening to music with more er… robust … language when my kids are in the car) but there can really only be only word for censorship done so badly. Or you could call it censor****, if you’d prefer 
Nirvana lyrics says:
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Nirvana is an American hard rock band that was formed by singer Kurt Cobain and bassist Krist Novoselic in Aberdeen, Washington in 1987. Nirvana went through a succession of drummers, the longest-lasting being Dave Grohl, who entered the band in 1990. …
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