Elmo is a beloved character. So much so that even adults are still very open about our love for Elmo. Color all of us shocked when suddenly Elmo’s official account on X was posting antisemitic remarks, yelling about the Jeffrey Epstein files, and other non-Sesame Street appropriate tweets.
“Elmo’s X account was briefly compromised yesterday by an unknown hacker who posted disgusting messages, including antisemitic and racist posts,” a spokesperson for Sesame Workshop, the company responsible for Sesame Street, said in a statement to CNN.
The posts were shocking as many of Elmo’s tweets tend to be uplifting, asking fans how their days are going and reminding us all that Elmo loves us. But the news also comes after Elon Musk’s Grok was accused of making antisemitic responses when asked questions on the platform. Part of Musk’s acquiring of X, formerly known as Twitter, was meant to help stop the hacks and protect the privacy of users.
As of this writing, no one knows who hacked Elmo’s account or why they felt the need to use the beloved 3 and a half year old Sesame Street character to share such messages, especially as their tweets were hateful and used words that Elmo would never use.
What is actually upsetting about this, apart from our own love for Elmo, is that there are children who look up to Elmo and maybe even some who have access to his X account. Now they’re forced to see those tweets from the character without context all because someone hacked the character.
There were obviously jokes about this like Jake Christie writing “he heard Rocco was on the list” about Elmo’s Epstein List tweet. The antisemitic posts from Sesame Street’s resident Rocco hater aren’t funny and all of this happened exactly one week after Musk’s AI was accused of being antisemitic.
The Grok account addressed it’s own controversy by writing: “We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts. Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X. xAI is training only truth-seeking and thanks to the millions of users on X, we are able to quickly identify and update the model where training could be improved.”
(featured image: Max)
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