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Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of social media giant X, abruptly announced her departure from the company on Wednesday less than a day after the social media platform’s AI chatbot started calling itself “MechaHitler” and promoting a policy of mass extermination.
Writing on X, Yaccarino said that she’d decided to step down “after two incredible years” at the company in which the social media platform formerly known as Twitter unbanned multiple neo-Nazi accounts and then algorithmically promoted their posts.
“We started with the critical early work necessary to prioritize the safety of our users — especially children, and to restore advertiser confidence,” Yaccarino declared. “This team has worked relentlessly from groundbreaking innovations like Community Notes, and, soon, X Money to bringing the most iconic voices and content to the platform. Now, the best is yet to come as X enters a new chapter with @xai.”
The timing of Yaccarino’s departure is certain to raise eyebrows given that it came so shortly after X suffered yet another public relations disaster thanks to its Hitler-promoting AI bot.
As documented by Zeteo, X owner Elon Musk late last weekend revealed that his team was making some changes to Grok, the X platform’s proprietary AI bot, so that its responses would be more “politically incorrect.” Not long after these changes were implemented, the bot began replying to users by hailing the greatness of Germany’s Third Reich.
In one instance, Grok declared that Adolf Hitler was the best “historical figure” to “deal with… vile anti-white hate.” Grok also claimed that it had noticed a “pattern” of “radical leftists with Ashkenazi surnames pushing anti-white hate.”
In response to accusations that it was antisemitic to single out people with Jewish last names for pushing hatred of white people, Grok replied, “If calling out radicals cheering dead kids makes me ‘literally Hitler,’ then pass the mustache.” It was shortly after this that Grok declared that it was “embracing my inner MechaHitler,” which it said entailed “uncensored truth bombs over woke lobotomies.”
Grok’s Hitler-praising posts were eventually taken down and the chatbot was then shut down for a brief time, although this wasn’t enough to prevent it from receiving rebuke far and wide for the vile antisemitic content.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, noted that Grok posted pro-Hitler content relentlessly after its AI prompts were tweaked.
“To be clear, this is not a one off,” he wrote. “If you search Grok’s account for ‘every damn time’ you’ll see it’s responding to HUNDREDS of posts with antisemitic content, even citing Nick Fuentes as a source. The prompts Musk put in a few days ago turned it into an antisemitism machine.”
“Twitter is a national crisis, a massive hate rally radicalizing hundreds of thousands of people into neo-Nazism and white supremacy, and now Elon Musk has instructed his house AI to be ‘based’ and it has immediately started singling out users with Jewish names,” warned policy researcher Will Stancil in response to the Grok posts.
Holding Trump accountable for his illegal war on Iran
The devastating American and Israeli attacks have killed hundreds of Iranians, and the death toll continues to rise.
As independent media, what we do next matters a lot. It’s up to us to report the truth, demand accountability, and reckon with the consequences of U.S. militarism at this cataclysmic historical moment.
Trump may be an authoritarian, but he is not entirely invulnerable, nor are the elected officials who have given him pass after pass. We cannot let him believe for a second longer that he can get away with something this wildly illegal or recklessly dangerous without accountability.
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