How to censor swear words in your video captions

If your video has swearing, you might want to censor it for a younger audience, for a brand partner, or simply to keep the tone right. This guide shows how to censor words in your captions and audio, and how to check the result so nothing slips through.

Before you start: what censoring can and can't do

Censoring tools work by matching words against lists. That's fast and consistent, but it doesn't understand context. A word list doesn't know the difference between a cooking video and an insult, and it can't promise what a platform will or won't allow. Platforms don't publish official lists of banned words, so treat any filter as a helpful first pass and always review the result yourself.

Step 1: Transcribe the video

Open Saynetic, add your video, and transcribe it. Censoring is based on the transcript, so check that swear words were transcribed correctly. Speech recognition sometimes softens or misspells them.

Step 2: Turn on a censor mode

Open the Censor tab. Everything is off by default. Choose what you want to catch:

Profanity filter: common swear words, in two tiers (mild and strong) that you can switch on separately.
Advertiser-safe mode: a broader list that also includes words that ad-friendly guidelines tend to flag, such as sexual terms, graphic violence and hard drugs. It includes the profanity tiers too.
Custom list: your own words, one per line. You can import or export the list as a .txt file. Useful for names you don't want shown, or words specific to your niche.

Slurs and hate terms are always censored whenever any mode is on.

Matching works on whole words and common word endings, so “fucking”, “fucked” and “fucker” are all caught by one entry. Harmless words that merely contain a listed word, like “class” or “Scunthorpe”, aren't flagged. If a word is flagged that shouldn't be, add it to the allowlist.

Step 3: Choose how censored words look

Asterisks: keeps the first letter (f***). Readers can still tell roughly what was said.
Symbols: a comic-style #$%@! replacement.
Emoji: replaces the word with an emoji of your choice (🤐 by default).
Blur box: a frosted, blurred box over the word, so viewers can see a word was there but not read it.
Remove: hides the word from the captions entirely.

Step 4: Censor the audio (optional)

Captions are only half of it: if the word is still audible, the video isn't really censored. Turn on Censor the audio too and choose:

Bleep: a classic 1 kHz tone over the word.
Mute: silence over the word, which is less noticeable.

The padding setting adds a little time before and after each word (50 milliseconds by default) so the edges of the word are covered. Saynetic also uses the audio itself to find where each censored word really starts, because automatic word timestamps tend to start slightly late. You can hear the bleeps in the preview before you export.

Step 5: Review every flagged word

The Review flagged words list shows every censored word with its time. Click a time to jump there and listen. For each one, choose Approve to keep it censored or Skip to leave it uncensored. You can also switch to the Censor tool in the transcript and tap any word to censor or uncensor that single occurrence, which is useful for a word that's fine in one sentence but not another.

Optional: algospeak substitutes

Some creators replace sensitive words with common substitutes (for example “unalive” instead of “kill”). The Algospeak swap does this in the captions only, using an editable list of pairs. It doesn't change your audio. Whether substitutes make any difference to how a platform treats your video isn't something anyone outside the platform can confirm, so use them for tone rather than as a guarantee.

Step 6: Export and double-check

Export your MP4 and watch it through once with the sound on. Check that:

Every bleep fully covers its word.
No censored word appears in the first frame (which may be used as a thumbnail).
The censoring style suits the tone of your video.

If you also upload subtitle files, the SRT and VTT downloads use the censored text too.

Tips for cleaner results

Mute is often less jarring than a bleep for occasional words; bleeps work better for comedy.
If a bleep clips the start of the next word, reduce the padding slightly.
Keep a custom list for your channel, export it, and reuse it across videos.

A note on monetization

Censoring can make a video more suitable for some audiences and advertisers, but it can't guarantee monetization or reach. Platforms make those decisions using their own rules and systems, which consider far more than individual words. Read each platform's published community and advertiser guidelines for what applies to your content.