The beloved “Sesame Street” monster Elmo shared a series of vulgar posts to X on Sunday, following an alleged hack.
The posts coming from the preschool aged muppet’s account contained racial slurs, antisemitic language and discussions about President Donald Trump and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Elmo’s account has nearly 650,000 followers. Sunday’s posts are a sharp deviation from Elmo’s typical content, which consists of uplifting, positive messages for his audience of young children.
“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 Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit company behind the long-running children’s series, said.
Epstein has been a popular topic on the platform since the DOJ and FBI shared a memo claiming that the agencies were unaware of any list of clients for the late financier’s trafficking operation. The release has split MAGA in two and been a ripe topic for discussion. Once he got his account back under control, however, Elmo didn’t feel the need to weigh in on the subject.
A post from July 7 was more typical of the monster’s online output.
“Happy Monday, everybody! Elmo will be right here cheering you on. ❤️ #MondayMotivation,” he wrote.
That’s not to say that the hack didn’t have something to do with the Trump administration. Elmo’s account was targeted at a time when the Trump administration and the GOP are pushing to defund public media, including Sesame Street’s longtime airer, PBS.
The Elmo hack follows an incident earlier this month where X’s chatbot, Grok, also went on an antisemitic tirade. The AI product made racist remarks, offered explicit stories about sexual assault referred to itself as “MechaHitler” before being taken offline by developers.
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