PlayStation Home Censorship Draws Gay Community Complaints; Blocks Hello, Bisexual, Lesbian, Jew

PlayStation Home's extremely restrictive text chat filter, which reportedly blocks everything from "hello" to "lesbian," has earned the ire of some in the gay rights community.

Michael Marsh discovered the restrictions after trying to create a "gay/straight alliance club," reports SFGate. Along with "lesbian," the gay rights activist was unable to use "gay" or "bisexual" in describing his club.

"By blocking a word like 'gay,' which is a preferred term by the gay community, you're encouraging it as a bad word," explained Marsh. "I can understand if they're filtering out profanity, but if feel like it's discrimination."

Other blocked words apparently include "Jew" and "Christ."

In response, Sony claimed that the filter was instituted during an earlier closed beta, and should have been removed when the free PlayStation 3 "3D social gaming community" went into public beta on December 11.

However, not everyone is satisfied by Sony's explanation.

"It's not enough to say it's a beta," said Kevin Johnson, who participated in the earlier closed beta phase. "[Sony] should have had a good understanding of these issues long ago. And it was brought to their attention before the open beta was launched."

Nor is this the first communications problem for Home, as issues with publicly-transmitted voices quickly led to Sony restricting voice chat to an invite-only basis.