Disney character text-to-speech voices on TikTok briefly censored words like 'gay' and 'queer'
- Disney rolled out text-to-speech voices for characters like Rocket Raccoon on TikTok.
- The voices were unable to say "gay," "lesbian," or "queer" after their Friday rollout.
Disney character text-to-speech voices on TikTok, which rolled out on Friday in tandem with the promotional event Disney+ Day, briefly censored the words "gay," "lesbian," and "queer," TikTok videos. The words have since been restored, a Disney Streaming representative confirmed.
TikTok's text-to-speech function can be found within the app's video editor. It allows users to convert typed text, displayed as an on-screen caption, to automated speech that plays as part of a video.
Disney partnered with TikTok to add voices reminiscent of Disney characters like Rocket Raccoon from "Guardians of the Galaxy," C-3PO from the Star Wars franchise, and Stitch from "Lilo & Stitch" to TikTok's popular text-to-speech function. The new voices rolled out on Friday, The Verge reported, and require TikTok users to unlock them by typing specific keywords in the video editor text function — for instance, "rocket," to unlock the Rocket Raccoon voice.
Several TikTok creators posted videos highlighting the function's censorship of certain LGBTQ-related terms, The Verge first reported.
One video from TikTok user @arahabaki__ with 189,800 likes, posted on Sunday, shows the user making various text-to-speech TikTok voices (of which there are several) say the phrase "gay rights." The Disney character voices, however, only say "rights" in the video.
Insider independently confirmed the censorship of the words "gay" or "lesbian" with the Rocket Raccoon voice on Saturday. Words like "trans," "bisexual," and "homosexual" were not censored.
Users were quick to find workarounds to make the text-to-speech characters say the words in videos during the period they were unavailable, using intentional misspellings like "geigh" or "qweer" to make Rocket Raccoon say "gay" or "queer."
One video from user @biandreadytocry101 with 1.1 million likes shows an image of Rocket Raccoon rotating in front of a pride flag.
"Why can't any of the Disney voices say gay?" An on-screen caption, voiced through the Rocket Raccoon text-to-speech function, reads. The user tested two different spellings — "gae" and "gai" — to circumvent the block.
"I'm gai," an on-screen caption in the video reads, this time voiced by the Stitch (from "Lilo & Stitch") text-to-speech function.
Disney Streaming and TikTok spokespeople did not comment specifically on why the voices had not been able to say "gay," "lesbian," and "queer." A TikTok spokesperson told Insider that TikTok's other text-to-speech voices do not censor those words.