Sesame Workshop said an unknown hacker was responsible for posting antisemitic and racist messages to Elmo‘s X account.
The posts also included messages linking Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender.
The posts originally appeared on the account, with almost 650,000 followers, on Sunday, and were removed later in the day.
A Sesame Workshop spokesperson said, “Elmo’s X account was briefly compromised yesterday by an unknown hacker who posted disgusting messages, including antisemitic and racist posts. The account has since been secured.”
A spokesperson for X did not immediately return a request for comment.
The incident follows one earlier this month on Grok, the X chatbot, which churned out comments that lauded Adolf Hitler. Grok later issued an apology for the “horrific behavior that many experienced. 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.”
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