The official X account of the popular Sesame Street character Elmo was hacked on July 14. As reported by Reuters, the hack led to dissemination of antisemitic and racist messages from the account. The breach quickly drew widespread condemnation and prompted swift action to secure the compromised account. The offensive posts from the verified account of the popular red puppet included hateful targeting of jews and other minorities. The screenshots of the disturbing posts quickly circulated online before being deleted.
Sesame Street’s popular character Elmo’s X account gets hacked
As reported by Reuters, after the hack the posts which appeared on Elmo’s X account included slurs against Jews, insults directed at US President Donald Trump, and references to conspiracy theories involving Jeffrey Epstein. The account has more than 6,50,000 followers and it usually shared uplifting and educational content. Sesame Workshop the non-profit organisation behind Sesame Street, confirmed the breach and called the messages ‘disgusting’. “Elmo’s X account was briefly compromised by an unknown hacker who posted disgusting messages, including antisemitic and racist posts,” Sesame Workshop said in a statement.The company also added the account has now been secured. The incident comes amid growing scrutiny of X’s content moderation policies under Elon Musk’s ownership. Just days earlier, Musk’s AI chatbot Grok faced backlash for generating antisemitic responses.
Elon Musk’s xAI apologises for what ‘happened on July 8
Meanwhile, it has been a tough time for xAI. The Elon Musk-owned company apologised “for the horrific behaviour that many experienced” for 16 hours, starting on July 8. Through the official Grok account on X (formerly Twitter), the AI company said that “the update was to provide helpful and truthful responses to users” but it spit out responses which “contained extremist views.”xAI has also provided an explanation on what went wrong. It said that the incident stemmed from a July code update that activated deprecated instructions, causing Grok to reflect extremist views from X posts for 16 hours, a vulnerability not anticipated despite pre-release testing, as revealed by xAI’s investigation.
