Elmo has been secured.
Over the weekend, the official, verified X account for the beloved Sesame Street character, with about 650,000 followers, began posting antisemitic material, as well as offensive posts related to Jeffrey Epstein and President Donald Trump.
A spokesperson for Sesame Workshop tells The Hollywood Reporter that the account was hacked, but that it has since been able to secure it.
“Elmo’s X account was briefly compromised yesterday by an unknown hacker who posted disgusting messages, including antisemitic and racist posts,” the spokesperson says. “The account has since been secured.”
Hacks of social media accounts are nothing new, of course, but the Elmo incident underscores how intellectual property owners, media companies and other consumer-facing brands need to be vigilant about securing them.
X, under owner Elon Musk, has also placed far less emphasis on moderating comments, allowing for users to post statements that in the past might have been flagged. Of course, those comments have not typically come from a character like Elmo, or from a show like Sesame Street.
The Elmo hack comes just a few days after X’s CEO, Linda Yaccarino, left the company, and after Grok, the AI chatbot embedded into X, began engaging in offensive and antisemitic chatter with some users.
www.hollywoodreporter.com
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