Teams Swears Off Censorship by Default

Microsoft Teams has made a change to its profanity filter for live captions. The default setting for the filter, which replaces swear words with asterisks, is now set to Off by default.

This means that users will no longer have to manually toggle off the filter each time they use the feature. However, this change does not apply to all users - government officials and staff will have to wait until August 2026 for the update to be rolled out to them.

The reason for the delay is not clear, but Microsoft notes that it is due to 'security checks and operational reasons'.

Microsoft introduced the profanity toggle in 2023 as a way to reduce bad language in Teams Live Captions. The feature has been available on an opt-in basis until now.