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Community Notes on Elon Musk’s app X correcting the Pentagon’s claims about a “deceitful” journalist involved in the Yemen message leak have disappeared from an official Department of Defense post.
The Pentagon’s official “Rapid Response” X account, which says it is “supporting the mission of @SecDef and fighting against fake news,” shared a clip of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Fox News responding to allegations that he and other U.S. national security officials leaked highly sensitive plans about a Yemen military strike to The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg over a group chat.
“You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited ‘so-called journalist,’” the account posted Monday evening, sharing Hegseth’s quote.
A Community Note, the function that allows X users to add context to “posts that might be misleading,” soon appeared underneath, calling the Pentagon out.
“Misleading,” it read. “The Atlantic included screenshots from the Signal chat.”
The note also said that “The White House confirmed the issue” and “House Speaker Mike Johnson confirmed it.”
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But by Tuesday afternoon, the note was no longer attached to the tweet. “The community note seems to have been taken down? But here’s a screenshot,” CNN’s Pentagon correspondent Haley Britzky posted.
The Washington Post’s military reporter, Alex Horton, accused X of purging the Community Notes from the post. “X has purged community notes from this Pentagon account that posts about transparency and accountability,” Horton said.
“Community Notes do not represent X’s viewpoint and cannot be edited or modified by our teams,” X claims on its website.
Horton’s post divided users. Some pointed out that the Community Notes function is crowd-sourced, and users can vote on whether they find it helpful or not.
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“People down voted it. Thats how it works,” one X account user responded.
Others said that users can down vote a Community Note if it does not align with their politics, not necessarily because it is incorrect.
“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 asked. “No wonder why Twitter has become MAGA propaganda central.”
Similar Community Notes were still visible on other posts at the time of writing, including one from Rep. Deborah Ross.
Hegseth spoke to reporters Monday after he stepped off a plane onto a landing strip at Pearl Harbor military base in Hawaii.
“So…You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again,” Hegseth said.
“This is the guy that peddles in garbage. This is what he does. I would love to comment on the Houthi campaign because of the skill and courage of our troops. I’ve monitored it very closely from the beginning.”
The White House has confirmed the text thread was legitimate.
