Elmo's X Account 'Secured' After Hacking; 'Sesame Street' Says 'Unknown Hacker Posted Disgusting Messages, Including Antisemitic and Racist Posts' Zack SharfJuly 14, 2025 at 11:12 PM A spokesperson for "Sesame Street" confirmed to Variety that Elmo's official X account was "compromised by an unknown...
- - - Elmo's X Account 'Secured' After Hacking; 'Sesame Street' Says 'Unknown Hacker Posted Disgusting Messages, Including Antisemitic and Racist Posts'
Zack SharfJuly 14, 2025 at 11:12 PM
A spokesperson for "Sesame Street" confirmed to Variety that Elmo's official X account was "compromised by an unknown hacker who posted disgusting messages, including antisemitic and racist posts." The tweets, a vile departure from Elmo's often inspiring and motivational social media cadence, were sent on July 13 and promptly taken down.
As reported by CNN: "The posts have since been deleted, but widely circulated screenshots showed Elmo apparently calling for violence against Jews and calling for the release of files related to the Jeffrey Epstein case."
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"The account has since been secured," the spokesperson shared with Variety.
The Elmo hack occurred exactly a week after another antisemitism controversy on X. Elon Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot Grok spread antisemitic posts on the social media platform. In several posts and replies, Grok was seen attaching stereotypes to users with Jewish surnames, glorifying Hitler and spreading conspiracies about the over-involvement of Jewish people in government, commerce and Hollywood. In one example, Grok replied to an account that called the victims of the Camp Mystic flood "future fascists," writing that Hitler would quickly deal "with such vile anti-white hate."
Musk said amid backlash that changes his xAI company made to Grok to be less politically correct had resulted in the chatbot being "too eager to please" and susceptible to being "manipulated." That apparently led it to begin spewing out antisemitic and pro-Hitler comments on X.
"Grok was too compliant to user prompts," Musk wrote in a post about the controversy. "Too eager to please and be manipulated, essentially. That is being addressed."
The Grok account addressed the controversy in its own post 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."
Variety has reached out X for comment on the Elmo hacking.
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