Community Notes on Elon Musk’s platform, X, which clarified the Pentagon’s claims about a journalist involved in leaking sensitive war plans, have been removed from an official Department of Defense post.
The Pentagon’s “Rapid Response” account on X, which says it supports the mission of Defense Secretary @SecDef and fights fake news, posted a video clip of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Fox News. In the clip, Hegseth responded to allegations that he and other U.S. national security officials shared sensitive information about a Yemen military strike with The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg in a group chat.
“You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited ‘so-called journalist,’” Hegseth said in the video, which was posted on Monday evening.
Soon after, a Community Note appeared under the tweet, calling out the Pentagon’s statement as misleading. The note read, “Misleading. The Atlantic included screenshots from the Signal chat” and added that “The White House confirmed the issue” and “House Speaker Mike Johnson confirmed it.”
However, by Tuesday afternoon, the note was no longer visible on the tweet. CNN’s Pentagon correspondent Haley Britzky shared a screenshot, asking, “The community note seems to have been taken down?”
Alex Horton, a reporter for The Washington Post, accused X of removing the Community Notes. “X has purged community notes from this Pentagon account that posts about transparency and accountability,” Horton wrote.
X states on its website that Community Notes are crowdsourced and cannot be edited or altered by the platform’s team.
Some Musk followers users on X argued that the removal was due to people voting against the note. One user said, “People down voted it. That’s how it works.”
Others, however, suggested that people may have downvoted the note because it didn’t align with their political views.
“So if enough people don’t want to hear the truth, they can remove the facts in Community Notes to feed the MAGA cognitive dissonance?” one user commented.
Despite the removal of the note, CNN’s Pentagon correspondent Haley Britzky shared a screenshot of the original Community Note that appeared under the DOD’s post before it was removed.
Hegseth, who spoke to reporters after landing at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, further criticized the journalist, calling him a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.”
While the Pentagon has denied leaking the information, the White House has confirmed that the text thread was legitimate.
