Sesame Street character Elmo’s official X (formerly Twitter) account was reportedly compromised. Over 649k of Elmo’s followers came across problematic tweets with antisemitic and racist messages that the account posted on Sunday, July 13th. Later, Sesame Workshop confirmed the hack and worked to restore account control.
Elmo’s X account shares antisemitic posts after getting hacked
Sesame Street fans came across controversial posts from Elmo’s social media account on July 13. They were eventually deleted on the same evening.
As per reports, the hacker used Elmo’s X account to spread antisemitic slurs. The posts also included calls for violence against Jews and references to Jeffrey Epstein files directed at President Donald Trump. (via BBC)
Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization behind the educational show, claimed an “unknown hacker” had taken over the account. Their official statement said, “Elmo’s X account was compromised by an unknown hacker who posted disgusting messages, including antisemitic and racist posts.” They assured followers that they are making efforts to restore the account.
Meanwhile, Elmo’s X account hack comes days after Elon Musk’s company apologized for the AI chatbot, Grok, posting a barrage of violent and antisemitic content. The official account of Grok posted a lengthy apology detailing what went wrong in the first week of July.
The company blamed a system update that caused Grok to reference “existing X user posts, including when such posts contained extremist views.” The malfunction apparently led Grok to praise Adolf Hitler, repeat conspiracy theories, and spew antisemitic tropes. The problematic coding change was active for 16 hours before X took action.
The note revealed, “Our intent for @grok is to provide helpful and truthful responses to users. After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot. This is independent of the underlying language model that powers grok.”
The official note also claimed X has already taken action. “We have removed that deprecated code and refactored the entire system to prevent further abuse,” Grok reassured.
As per The New York Times, Grok’s unusual posting started when the AI chatbot responded to user prompts with antisemitic tropes and white nationalist talking points in the first week of July. xAI froze the chatbot’s X account on July 8.
Originally reported by Arpita Adhya on ComingSoon.net.