Makers of Sesame Road blame an unknown hacker for slew of offensive social media posts.
The makers of Sesame Road have deleted a slew of offensive social media posts after hackers hijacked the puppet Elmo’s X account to launch a tirade about Jews and Jeffrey Epstein.
The posts on Elmo’s account on Sunday referred to as for the extermination of Jewish folks, referred to United States President Donald Trump as a “puppet” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and demanded the discharge of regulation enforcement recordsdata about Epstein, the accused intercourse trafficker who died in 2019.
The posts attracted a flurry of consideration on-line earlier than being deleted a short while after they had been uploaded on Sunday.
“Elmo’s X account was compromised by an unknown hacker who posted disgusting messages, together with antisemitic and racist posts,” a spokesperson for the Sesame Workshop advised Al Jazeera in an announcement on Monday.
“The account has since been secured.”
Elmo, a furry pink monster identified for his high-pitched voice and behavior of referring to himself within the third particular person, debuted on PBS’s Sesame Road in 1980, rapidly turning into one of many present’s most beloved characters.
Elmo’s X account, which has greater than 650,000 followers, is normally related to uplifting messages and clips of the puppet enjoying video games with different Sesame Road characters and his human associates.
Final 12 months, a submit asking Elmo’s viewers how they had been doing went mega-viral, attracting practically 225 million views on X.
The hacking is the most recent incident to attract consideration to anti-Jewish content material on tech billionaire Elon Musk’s X.
Earlier this month, Musk’s synthetic intelligence firm xAI was pressured to make upgrades to its chatbot Grok after customers reported that it supplied anti-Jewish responses to questions, together with statements praising Nazi chief Adolf Hitler.
