Rumors spread last fall about Census impersonators carrying fraudulent IDs who were knocking on doors and robbing people in their homes.
Fear circulated on Twitter. Neighborhood watch groups posted warnings on Facebook. Local TV stations aired stories on how to protect yourself when a stranger shows up to your house.
The only problem? It was baloney. But the government is combating such scams with an aggressiveness underscoring how seriously it takes the nation's only moment of mandatory civic responsibility.
The so-called Home Affairs Hoax is one of the more sinister efforts so far at disrupting the 2020 Census, prompting the bureau to put an entire page on its website devoted to dispelling the rumors.
But preventing such coordinated disinformation campaigns — which threaten a head count that will shape the balance of power in Congress and billions in federal spending for a decade — has prompted the Census Bureau to do more. Before the enumeration began in earnest this month, the agency created something seemingly unique in the federal government: a team dedicated exclusively to combating the spread of malevolent disinformation and misguided misinformation.
Known as the "Trust and Safety Team," roughly two dozen federal employees and contractors are monitoring traditional and social media 24 hours a day, seven days a week for signs of inaccurate information that could steer people away from completing a questionnaire as the law requires. They respond as necessary to correct the narrative.
The false stories about home invasions spread at a particularly bad time for the Census, while workers were in communities across the country for pre-count field canvassing that required knocking on doors to verify addresses, said Zack Schwartz, the Trust and Safety operations director.
"It was very scary for us," he said. "We were starting to see some of the comments online saying, 'Oh, when the fake robbers come to my home, my dogs will be ready.' Or 'I'm glad the Second Amendment exists.'"
He added: "Those things really put our staff at risk, and it's a huge priority, as you can imagine, to make sure our field staff is safe and secure."
As the hoax gained attention, the team countered. First it alerted the social media platforms there had been no police reports anywhere connecting a Census Bureau employee to a robbery — or of robberies by someone pretending to be census worker.
The team then used third-party fact-checkers and the bureau's website to respond with authoritative content that addressed the rumor, Schwartz said.
After being notified of the hoax, the social media platforms combed through their networks and either removed the false posts entirely or added a disclaimer to warn people the post had been discredited. And soon enough, Schwartz said, "We started seeing the rumors slow significantly."
The successful response was tied to the bureau's partnerships with social media giants including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, which updated their terms of service policies to bar census-related misinformation on their platforms, Schwartz said.
On Thursday, Facebook cited its terms of service policy when it removed hundreds of ads for President Trump's re-electionthat directed users to a campaign survey labeled "2020 census."
"There are policies in place to prevent confusion around the official U.S. census, and this is an example of those being enforced," a company spokesman said.
Partnerships with the tech companies have been essential in the bureau's misinformation fight, Schwartz said, adding the team reviews more than a dozen rumors a day, analyzing their spread and the appropriate response. The most common myths are posted on the bureau's dedicated rumors page.
As the nationwide census begins this month, the Census Bureau is soliciting help in tracking and reporting falsehoods, which can be shared with the agency through its social media channels or by emailing rumors@census.gov.
"Everyone should be an observer," Schwartz said. "We've had great success with information coming into the bureau, the platforms and other places to let us know about the mis- and dis-information out there."
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.