Censorship

Censorship is the suppression of nudity, language, harmful or sensitive topics etc.. It is believed to be a very controversial topic and a very two sided argument.
For:

• Stops young children seeing/hearing inappropriate language and visual imagery. 
• Allows videos and songs to be shown to a wider target audience. 
• If films have certificates, why shouldn't things stop being shown in music videos?

Against:

• Stops artists from being able to fully express themselves. 
• Creates guidelines for bands to follow. 
• Its not all equally, in one persons eye it may not be bad, but in another it may come across as offensive. 

An example of a censored video is Lady Gaga - Love Game due to "frequent verbal and visual sexual references".

Ways of hiding censorship:

• Blanking; when the volume is muted for all or part of the word.
• Bleeping; playing a noise, usually a "beep", over all or part of the word.
• Resampling; using a like-sounding portion of vocals and music to override the offending word.
• Resinging; Replacing a word with a more appropriate word.
• Backmasking; taking the offending word and reversing the audio, sometimes the whole audio is reversed (often because it is a home-made job), but more usually only the vocal track is reversed.
• Repeating; repeating the word just said before the explicit word was used.
• Skipping; deleting the word from the song without a time delay.
• Echo; instead of saying a word, it echoes the last word(s) said in the line.
• Disc scratching; in hip hop, scratching on the word, making it sound like another word, or make the word said faster or slower.
• RoboVoicing; making the word totally non-understandable by overpowering a robovoice effect (usually used as a last resort for home-made jobs).
• Distorting; Usually in Hip-Hop, less offensive words such as "shit" or else is distorted. It is usually done by shifting down the pitch.