Sesame Workshop is working to regain control of Elmo's X account after a hacker posted racist and antisemitic messages. A spokesperson confirmed Monday that the account was compromised over the weekend. Instead of its usual uplifting posts, the account shared offensive content, including a reference to the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. The posts were quickly deleted. Elmo's account, with 650,000 followers, has been a platform for mental health awareness. Last year, it gained attention when Elmo asked followers how they were doing, prompting responses from figures like then-President Joe Biden and Chance the Rapper.
By MICHELLE CHAPMAN and BARBARA ORTUTAY AP Business Writers
Hours after a series of outages that left X unavailable to thousands of users, Elon Musk is claiming that the social media platform is being targeted in a "massive cyberattack." Musk said on a post Monday that the attacker is either a large, coordinated group or a country. Complaints about outages spiked Monday at 6 a.m. Eastern and again at 10 a.m, with more than 40,000 users reporting no access to the platform, according to the tracking website Downdetector.com. A sustained outage appeared to begin just after noon Eastern.
The social media platform X says it will now formally allow people to show consensual adult content, as long as it is clearly labeled as such. The move makes official a policy already in place when the platform was known as Twitter, before billionaire Elon Musk purchased it in 2022. In a recent update on its website, the San Francisco-based company says users should be able to create, distribute, and consume material related to sexual themes as long as it is consensually produced and distributed. It adds that sexual expression, whether visual or written, can be a legitimate form of artistic expression.
