Third of American film viewers find British profanity too offensive
Many people also prefer to avoid 'blasphemous' language when watching films
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Your support makes all the difference.There’s a very memorable scene at the beginning of Love Actually where Bill Nighy’s character, Billy Mack, blurts out a series of profane swear words while trying to sing a Christmas song in a recording studio.
Some would say it’s one of the film’s most unforgettable and comedic scenes.
However, a third of American viewers would prefer to bleep out the expletives while watching it, according to a recent study.
Researchers from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) assessed data from an American streaming website called VidAngel, which is no longer operative.
The video company allowed its users to choose to filter out swear words, nudity, sexual scenes and violence from the content that they were watching.
For the study, which was published on the Social Science Research Network, Douglas Lichtman and Benjamin Nyblade from the School of Law at UCLA looked at information that had been gathered by VidAngel over the course of 2016.
They found that 29 per cent of the users decided to filter out words from films that were classed as “British profanity”.
This means that films such as the classic Richard Curtis rom-com would have been censored by almost a third of the site’s American users.
On top of that, 60 per cent of the film viewers chose to omit the F-word from the films that they were watching, with nearly half choosing to filter out the word “damn” and a third opting to avoid the word “dick”.
Swear words weren’t the only thing that people using the film-watching site found offensive enough to censor.
Many also decided to steer clear of religious references, with around half of users filtering out the word “god”, 53 per cent avoiding the word “Jesus” and a total of 41 per cent avoiding all words that could be classed as blasphemous.
In October 2017, VidAngel filed for bankruptcy after being sued by several film studios in 2016 for allegedly being in violation of copyright law.
Professor Lichtman believes parents should be able to filter out swear words from films that his children might watch.
“I understand the directors’ objections, I get it. I’m saying that in my home with my kids I want to be able to knock out naughty words if I so choose,” he said, according to The Times.
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