Great, now you've posted that Lego will have to ban any text messaging features.

They won't ban it, they'll have to hire more people to form Second Penis Prevention Brigade to monitor and censor all the messages in real-time.

Surely this is a solvable AI/computer vision problem. And in text, just search for the regular expression "8=+D".

Your regular expression catches very few penises. A very simple case:

    8------>

But you can easily solve that one. A much harder case would be catching stuff like this:

     _
    / \_________
                |\
                | |
       _________|/
    \_/

And even if you could do some image recognition, I think you'd have a hard time differentiating between stuff like this:

    O
   -|-
    |
   / \

And this:

    O
   -|-
    |_
   / \

...because what makes it a penis is not the shape, but the context, which is very hard to recognize.

Don't underestimate the difficulty of filtering human-generated data.

Also, I can't believe I just spent 5 minutes making ASCII penises.