Yesterday afternoon, Donald Trump Jr. posted a graphic video to X (previously Twitter) that purported to indicate Hamas fighters murdering Israeli residents in the course of the assault final Saturday morning. “You don’t negotiate with this,” Trump Jr. wrote. “There’s only one way to handle this.” The son of former US president Donald Trump added that the video had come from a “source within Israel.”

The submit was shared extensively, and inside hours it had amassed over 4 million views.

Then X’s user-generated fact-checking system, Community Notes, appended a message to the tweet, stating: “This is an old video and is not from Israel,” accompanied by a hyperlink to the unique video. The be aware advised that Trump Jr. was contributing to what has been a flood of disinformation on X since Hamas militants attacked Israel on Saturday, supercharged by verified customers and accompanied by different conspiracy theories pushed by the company’s owner, Elon Musk.

But WIRED has now verified that the Community Notes system seems to be fallacious. According to an impartial OSINT evaluation revealed on Wednesday, the video Trump Jr. posted is actual. It was recorded throughout Saturday’s assault and does present Hamas fighters taking pictures Israelis, the evaluation discovered.

The incident highlights how Community Notes, touted this week by X as one of many essential methods it was tackling disinformation, continues to be struggling to perform as supposed and is, in some situations, including to the extent of disinformation on X somewhat than correcting it.

The Community Notes system is made up of X customers who volunteer to fact-check posts on the location. It is X’s major fact-checking mechanism since Musk eradicated just about all full-time Trust and Safety staff and part-time moderators who beforehand did that work.

The volunteers, who should be permitted by X to contribute to Community Notes, counsel notes so as to add to what they imagine are deceptive posts. Those notes are solely displayed publicly as soon as a enough variety of volunteers have permitted them.

Once permitted, notes are considered “helpful” and posted publicly. This is how X describes what it sees as a “helpful” be aware: “Enough contributors from different perspectives agreed that this note is helpful, so it’s being shown as context on the post.”

Earlier this week, X praised the Community Notes team for tackling the misinformation that has flooded the platform up to now week and stated new accounts are being enrolled “in real time to propose and rate notes.” On Tuesday, an NBC investigation discovered the system was not functioning as proposed; of the 2 Israel-Hamas misinformation claims investigated by the outlet, greater than 1 / 4 had notes that remained non-public as they’d not been permitted by sufficient volunteers, whereas roughly two-thirds had no notes in any respect.