Can I disable the PS4's profanity filter?
I recently used the PS4's "Share" feature to tweet a screenshot of a Deathclaw, and I included #Deathclaw
in the tweet. Then later, in the "Recent Activities" section of the Fallout 4 page on the XMB, I saw a card with my tweet, only the Deathclaw hashtag appeared as #Dea***law
- the PS4 decided to replace the string "thc" with asterisks, apparently because those letters happen to be the initials of the chemical name for a psychoactive compound, which some individuals might object to seeing.
While I can see the practical applications of a language filter on social media content, the fact that it seems to operate on a regular expression that completely fails to account for context and thus triggers false positives can actually lead to the opposite effect - it took me quite a while to figure out why there were asterisks at all, and when I finally did, I realized that the word filter had actually caused me to think about the word it was trying to censor.
I'm a grown adult, and I don't have kids, but if I did, I'd much prefer they see the word basement
and think about the subterranean level of a building, then that they see ba*****t
, get confused, investigate to determine what characters were replaced with asterisks, and then are thinking about what that word represents.
A few other words that my Googling told me would receive the same treatment:
- Connection
- Doggie
- Assassin
- Prometheus
- Canal
- Cumbersome
Is there any way to disable the word filter on the PS4's XMB/"Recent Activities" feed?
Solution 1:
No.
I actually spent quite a bit of time wandering around the PS4 Manual page (Link) and there is absolutely no information about it.
The best way forward with this would be to contact Sony Support to see if they have plans of fixing this in a future update. I highly doubt it however.