- Elmo’s social media account on X was compromised by hackers Sunday. The dangerous actors posted antisemitic feedback and demanded the discharge of the Epstein recordsdata. As of Monday morning, Sesame Workshop had regained management of the account.
The usually upbeat feed of Sesame Road’s most well-known redhead took a darkish and antisemitic flip Sunday after it was compromised by hackers.
The Twitter/X feed of Elmo started spewing obscenity-filled antisemitic feedback on Sunday in addition to posting a requirement that the Epstein recordsdata be launched publicly. All totaled, a half-dozen posts had been made by the hackers. As of Monday morning, Elmo (effectively, technically, Sesame Workshop) had regained management of the account and deleted the offending posts.
The posts got here simply days after the Grok chatbot on X referred to itself as MechaHitler and echoed many antisemitic views. X has since issued an apology for that, saying a system replace was guilty, because it triggered Grok to consult with “current X person posts; together with when such posts contained extremist views.”
Whereas lots of the hacked posts had been written in the identical third-person type Elmo makes use of in his posts, the language they used was far totally different than followers had been used to seeing.
Whereas that is probably the most excessive instance, social media posts by Muppets have courted controversy previously. In 2022, Sesame Road posted a video of Elmo getting a COVID-19 vaccine shot. That set off a disagreement with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who has beforehand picked a Twitter combat with Huge Fowl over the fictional character’s personal vaccination standing, saying it was “authorities propaganda…on your 5-year-old!”
Cookie Monster, in the meantime, weighed in on shrinkflation final 12 months, saying he was not a fan since “Me cookies are getting smaller.”
As for Elmo, he’s transferring previous the hack. His most up-to-date submit (made earlier than he misplaced management of the account) was wishing his furry buddy Tango a “Pleased Gotcha Day”
