Battlefield V Beta has Banned the Term ‘White man’ in Game Chat – EA Say Profanity Filter is a “work-in-progress”

YouTuber and streamer Joe “AngryJoe” Vargas discovered to his (hilarious) surprise that the phrase “White man” is not permitted in Battlefield V game chat, which is just the latest in a string of odd restricted chat terms.

The Battlefield V open beta is available right now on PS4, Xbox and PC, and fans have already discovered that a number of peculiar words are restricted in the game chat – including ‘DLC’.

And of course, the words and phrases you would expect are also banned (racial/homophobic slurs and other insults or trolling), but for some strange reason, the phrase ‘White man’ is also restricted.

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Phrases ‘Asian man’ or ‘Brown man’ are not banned, only White man, as AngryJoe tested it out during a recent livestream.

As you can see in the clip, the chat box simply turns AngryJoe’s input (in the top left corner) into a series of asterisks – but doesn’t apply the same treatment to other terms.

EA did respond to the community’s surprise that ‘DLC’ was a banned term, saying that the filtering system was not working exactly as intended.

It’s unclear if this case of censoring ‘White man’ is also unintentional, but they do say that the filter is a ‘work in progress’.

One of the new features we’re working on is a profanity filter in-game to reduce toxicity.

That being said, we have heard some complaints that the filter is blocking words that aren’t profanity or shouldn’t be blocked, like “DLC”, etc. and isn’t blocking some words that should be (obviously, I will not be providing examples of these.)

Please note: This is a work-in-progress and we will be taking this feedback to tweak the sensitivity of the filter and improve its usage without censoring relevant conversation.Healthy discussion is what drives improvement in our games, and we’d never want to impede that.

Thanks for bringing your concerns to us regarding the current iteration of the profanity filter and we’ll keep working on it.

Battlefield V is still in the beta stage, with the full game set for release on November 20 (delayed from initial release date of October 19), so there is time for any errors to be fixed before launch.