Elmo, the beloved Sesame Avenue character, grew to become the most recent social media hacker sufferer as his X (previously Twitter) account was taken over Sunday.
The hacker posted a collection of profane messages on Elmo’s account, which contained antisemitic language and racial slurs, in addition to posts concentrating on President Donald Trump and his involvement within the Epstein information.
The posts have been shortly taken down after the compromise had been detected.
In a press release supplied to The New York Occasions, a Sesame Workshop spokesperson mentioned, “Elmo’s X account was compromised as we speak by an unknown hacker who posted disgusting messages, together with antisemitic and racist posts. We’re working to revive full management of the account.”
Elmo’s X account, which has almost 650,000 followers, has not posted any new messages because the hacking incident, with the latest one posted Saturday, July 12, in celebration of “Completely happy Gotcha Day.”
This newest incident comes as X continues to be recovering from one other self-inflicted controversy it suffered within the earlier week when its synthetic intelligence chatbot, Grok, went rogue and shared some extremist views, together with antisemitic feedback and reward for Adolf Hitler.
Since Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of the platform in 2022, X has seen a roughly 50% spike in weekly hate speech incidents, together with homophobic, transphobic, and racist slurs.
All this continued adverse consideration might have been what led to Linda Yaccarino’s sudden exit as CEO of the social media firm after a two-year run.
Her departure additional deepens doubts about X’s capability to observe model security and exposes its vulnerability in producing constant promoting income.
