Remove Inappropriate Emojis in Gmail, Chat, and Docs

This article is written for Google Workspace for Education Administrators.

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The Emoji Problem

Emojis are everywhere. Kids love emojis too. While it's fun to express one's feelings using emojis, you will soon realize inappropriate emojis showing up in students' emails, like poop, middle finger, gun, or knife. It doesn't seem healthy communication for kids.

This article shows you how Safe Doc removes these unfriendly emojis in Gmail, and Docs editors to sanitize the communication environment for your students.

If you have yet to install Safe Doc for your school, please get a 30 days trial. After you get the trial license key, please deploy Safe Doc and read Safe Doc Configuration as they are prerequisites for you to understand the rest of article.

Config Safe Doc to Remove Specific Inappropriate Emojis

By default, Safe Doc will only block the middle finger emoji in Gmail, Docs, Slides and Drawing. But Safe Doc can be customized to remove specified emojis. The policy associated with this feature is BlockEmojis. To block specific emojis, insert the emoji characters into the list enclosed by double quotes "". When the policy is applied, students won't be able to find and use those emojis in emailing and chatting.

"BlockEmojis": {
  "Value": ["🍆", "🍑", "👄", "🌋", "👌", "✊", "🖕", "💩", "🔫", "🗡", "🔪", "💣", "🔨", "💀", "😵", "🤕", "😡", "😠", "💢", "🔥", "💊", "💉", "🔌", "🌿", "🍁", "😌", "😤", "🗯️", "💭", "💨", "🚬"]
}

Emoji Characters

Emojis are a special group of Unicode characters rendered by browsers. This page provided a complete list of emojis, Full Emoji List. To block out the bad emojis, simply copy and paste the emoji to the policy BlockEmojis list.

Emoji Reaction

On April-05-2022, Google introduced Emoji Reaction Features. That is simply reaction emoji in Docs and Chat. By default, there are no Admin or End-User settings. The only thing is that the preferences will be shared on both apps. The emojis you will mostly use in one app will be reflected on other apps.

Reaction emojis are available in other emoji locations.

1. Select any text.
2. An emoji icon will appear on the right edge of Doc.
3. Click it and you will see the Emojis.

Now see below, how Safe Doc also blocks the bad emojis from there too.

That said, Google's emojis are a subset of the full emoji list, so it's unnecessary to blacklist emojis that are not visible and accessible to students. Also, please note an emoji may look different across browsers and applications, but the emoji is the same Unicode character under the hood.

Config Safe Doc to Disable the Emoji Feature Completely

Some admins prefer aggressively disabling the emoji functionality completely. Apply this setting to the policy.

"BlockEmojis": {
  "Value": ["*"]
}

Filter Emails with Inappropriate Emojis

Yet hiding emoji buttons can hinder students from abusing these emojis, it's only half of the story. Students still can find those emoji characters somewhere else. If your organization enables Gmail for students, it's recommended to block any emails with these emojis.

With that in mind, it's suggested to create a content compliance rule in Google Admin Console to reject emails with inappropriate emojis. A rule example is the following screenshot. It rejects all outgoing emails containing at least one middle finger emoji, pistol, kitchen knife, or poop emojis.

Instructions

1. Log into your Admin Console.
2. Go to Apps > Google Workspace > Gmail > Content Compliance.
3. Select your students' OU.
4. Scroll to the Content compliance setting under Compliance section. Click Add another or Configure depending on whether you had rules already.
5. Check Outbound and Internal - sending in an Email message to affect.
6. In expressions, select
   1. Advanced content match
   2. Location: Headers + Body
   3. Match type: Matches regex
   4. Regexp: 🖕|🔫|🔪|💩. Copy emojis from Full Emoji List and paste them here. Add a | between them, a vertical bar, not number 1 or letter l. No spaces.
7. In the action step, specify how you handle such messages, say Reject message. Also, it's wise to add a rejection notice back to your students.
8. Click Save.
9. Finally test your rule, and iterate until you're satisfied.

Students will receive a bounce back email Message not delivered like this,

There is no counterpart solution to filter messages with emojis for Chat.

Takeaway

It's like fighting with flu to prevent students from exploring new features (new emojis). Students are smart. If you have any questions or suggestions for the solution, please get in touch with [email protected].

Do you know Safe Doc can also block stickers (e.g. the poop sticker) too? Check out Block Stickers in Hangouts.