Steam Labs – a branch of the platform that tests and eventually rolls out new features – has announced the latest piece of functionality in the form of Chat Filtering.

This feature, which is in beta at the time of writing, does what it says on the tin: filters out certain words from Steam Chat and supported games. In the future it may even apply to other user-made content across Steam’s sites and games.

“Available now through Steam Labs, Steam Text & Chat Filtering obscures commonly used strong profanity and slurs sent via chat. The new Steam feature takes the chat filtering we built for games like CS:GO, Destiny 2, and Dota 2, and moves it into Steam for a customized experience that is consistent across supporting games and the Steam client, web, and mobile chat experiences,” reads the announcement.

Outside of the common profanity, those who join the beta can also set up their own filter list to block certain words of phrases from appearing. This is not only handy as different people react differently to strong language, but it also means that not only English will be supported by the Chat Filtering.

In the FAQ attached to the announcement a rather important question is asked: if Steam has this list of words and phrases it deems offensive, at least for this beta, why not ban them outright?

Steam answers this by saying that it would rather give individual users the power to determine what they want to see, which we have to agree with. Adding to that: if you only play online with a close group of friends, who happen to use profanity in a playful way that doesn’t affect others, you wouldn’t want Steam to stop that.

“We know marginalized groups can reclaim language for themselves, and we don’t want to stand in the way of enabling groups of Steam users from doing so when chatting with one another on Steam. So players have an option to see profanity and slurs from their Steam Friends, if they wish,” the announcement adds.

Those who don’t agree with this or the entire concept of Chat Filtering can simply choose not to engage with the beta. That being said Steam Lab experiments usually are finalised and rolled out to the rest of the platform eventually.

If you’d like to take part in the beta and provide your input into how it shapes out, instructions to do so are available in the Steam Community.

Finally, and this is just a bit of semi-related trivia, the term for replacing profanity with random symbols – like in the header image above – is “grawlix“.