On March 18, 2025, ESPN baseball columnist Jeff Passan made an X post (archived) claiming that the U.S. Department of Defense removed a page about the U.S. Army career of baseball legend Jackie Robinson from its website.
Robinson is best known for breaking baseball's so-called color barrier in 1947, when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers. Previously, Major League Baseball had been closed to Black players. Robinson served in the Army during World War II.
Passan's post read in full:
This used to be the URL for a story on the @DeptofDefense website about Jackie Robinson's time in the Army. The story has been removed. The ghouls who did this should be ashamed. Jackie Robinson was the embodiment of an American hero. Fix this now.
(@JeffPassan on X)
Snopes readers wrote in and searched our site for information about whether the DOD had really removed a page about Robinson. Examples of the claim appeared in posts on social media platforms including Reddit (archived), Facebook (archived) and Instagram (archived). The story also drew attention from media outlets including ESPN, The Washington Post and The Independent.
In short, it was true that the Defense Department removed the article about Robinson as part of a departmentwide push to "remove all DoD news and feature articles, photos and videos that promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" in accordance with a Feb. 26 memo that described the removals as a "digital content refresh."
However, the page was online again as of the afternoon of March 19.
In a statement shared with multiple media outlets including ESPN, ABC News and NBC News, Pentagon press secretary John Ullyot said, "In the rare cases that content is removed — either deliberately or by mistake — that is out of the clearly outlined scope of the directive, we instruct the components and they correct the content accordingly."
Because the DOD indeed took the page down — if only temporarily — we've rated the claim true.
We reached out to the department to ask for details about its decision to restore the page about Robinson after initially removing it, as well as to inquire about whether it plans to review — and potentially restore — other removed pages.
In response, a DOD spokesperson sent a link to a video statement by Sean Parnell, the Pentagon's chief spokesperson. Parnell began the video, which also appeared in a post on his official X account, by saying he wanted to "take a short moment to provide some clarity on our efforts to ensure that our public-facing content honors our warfighters, our mission and reflects President Trump and Secretary Hegseth's priorities."
Here are the facts about the removal of DEI content. pic.twitter.com/gHQWi40aIx
— Sean Parnell (@SeanParnellATSD) March 20, 2025
Parnell suggested the department used artificial intelligence (AI) tools to identify content for removal, saying, "because of the realities of AI tools and software, some important content was incorrectly pulled offline to be reviewed." He continued: "We want to be very clear, history is not DEI. When content is either mistakenly removed, or if it's maliciously removed, we continue to work quickly to restore it."
The article in question, titled "Sports Heroes Who Served: Baseball Great Jackie Robinson Was WWII Soldier," dated to 2021. Archived versions of the page going back to 2022 were available through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Versions captured on March 17 and March 19 showed only a "404 - Page Not Found" error message and had a URL with the letters "dei" added before the page's key words, as can be seen in the screenshot below.
(Wayback Machine)
In versions archived after the DOD restored the page on March 19, the letters "dei" no longer appeared in the URL. The text comparison website Text Compare found no differences between the text of the earliest available archived version of the page and that of the version restored on March 19.
In a statement the department shared with outlets including the The Washington Post and ESPN, Ullyot said:
Everyone at the Defense Department loves Jackie Robinson, as well as the Navajo Code Talkers, the Tuskegee airmen, the Marines at Iwo Jima and so many others — we salute them for their strong and in many cases heroic service to our country, full stop. […] We do not view or highlight them through the prism of immutable characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, or sex. We do so only by recognizing their patriotism and dedication to the warfighting mission like ever [sic] other American who has worn the uniform.
Ullyot had previously told multiple outlets that asked about the Robinson page removal that he was "pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms."
A Google search for Robinson's name across all URLs beginning with "defense.gov" returned several other pages mentioning him on the DOD website, all of which were available at the time of this writing.
Among the results of search for all DOD sites mentioning the Negro Leagues — the all-Black professional baseball leagues Robinson played for before entering the MLB — was an indexed preview for a now-defunct page that appeared to have discussed another notable Black veteran and baseball Hall of Famer, Ernest "Jud" Wilson, who is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
(Google)
The page about Wilson showed only a 404 error message at the time of this writing, and the letters "dei" appeared in its URL — suggesting that the page's removal was part of the same anti-DEI "content refresh" that led to the temporary removal of Robinson's page. We were unable to locate an archived version of the page about Wilson that preserved its original text.
We've looked into other rumors about the DOD removing pages about notable American veterans, including the Navajo Code Talkers and the Black Medal of Honor recipient Charles Calvin Rogers.