Deaf News: Frustration as Instagram Stories’ automatic captions censor swear words

Instagram has been criticised by deaf people online after it was revealed that its new automatic captions feature for Stories censors profanities spoken by users.

Videos on social media have shown the tool, announced on Tuesday, replacing the audio with a bleep effect, while the caption itself sees the curse word switched for ‘$@#%&’.

Commenting on the revelation on Thursday, Charlotte Hyde, a Deaf accessibility advocate, tweeted: “Just learned via [YouTuber] Daniel J Layton’s Instagram Story that the new Captions sticker not only censors swear words on the captions, but also puts a literal beep sound over you saying them.

“Instagram… hun… we need to have a chat about censoring things for deaf people.

“You can only swear if you don’t make your story accessible. Lovely.”

Just learned via @DanielJLayton's Instagram story that the new Captions sticker not only censors swear words on the captions, but also puts a literal beep sound over you saying them. @instagram…hun…we need to have a chat about censoring things for deaf people.

— Charlotte Hyde (@charlhyde) May 6, 2021

Other deaf and disabled campaigners criticised the news, with one describing it as “unnecessary” and another calling it as “ridiculous”.

“[It’s] also a bit alarming on a sensory level with unexpected noises being difficult for a lot of [neurodivergent] people,” added Charli Clement, an autistic and disabled activist.

Instagram isn’t the only platform to come under fire for its decision to censor captions. In September, YouTube sparked an outcry when it chose to replace “potentially inappropriate” words in its automatic captions with ‘[__]’, causing curse words to be picked up by its systems.

“The point of closed captioning is to type what is being said no matter what is being said. This includes swear words.

“The words are already being said out loud, censoring the words is infantilizing deaf people, especially adults,” American YouTuber Rikki Poynter wrote on Instagram.

In a statement to The Limping Chicken, a Facebook company spokesperson said they want their community to have a “dafe and positive experience” on the photo-sharing app.

“We understand the impact that offensive, derogatory language can have on people and think nobody should have that experience on Instagram. That’s why we use AI to detect this sort of language and actively block from captions.

“If you want your words to be unblocked, just manually edit your text,” they said.

Users can add captions to a Stories post by recording a video or selecting one from their photo gallery, opening the sticker tray and selecting ‘captions’ from the options available.

The user’s speech will then be converted to text, with the option for the transcription to be edited in terms of style, text, colour and position.

Photo: Instagram.

By Liam O’Dell. Liam is a mildly deaf freelance journalist and campaigner from Bedfordshire. He wears bilateral hearing aids and can be found talking about disability, theatre, politics and more on Twitter and on his website.