The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
‘It’s a fine target’: Census bureau to fight misinformation
CHICAGO — Worried about internet trolls and foreign powers spreading false news, census officials are preparing to battle misinformation campaigns for the first time in the count’s 230year history.
The stakes are huge. Who participates in the 2020 census count could influence how U.S. congressional seats and billions of federal tax dollars to educate children, help lowincome families and pave new roads are divvied up.
“It’s a fine target,” former U.S. Census Bureau director John Thompson said of the form, which is sent every decade to households in America to count the population. “If you want to disrupt a democracy, you can certainly go about it by disrupting a census.”
Already, false and inaccurate social media posts about the census have begun to appear online, where they have been viewed thousands of times. Foremost on everyone’s mind are the misinformation wars waged during the last presidential election to confuse U.S. voters.
Fake posts about the census began popping up days after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that the Trump administration could not ask about citizenship status on the 2020 census: Conservative bloggers, Twitter users and pundits falsely blamed former President Barack Obama for scrubbing the question from the form in 2010. In fact, the main census form hasn’t included a citizenship question since 1950, and the bureau’s own analysis found it would discourage people from participating, possibly skewing results.
And last month, sham posts popped up warning online neighborhood chat groups that robbers were scamming their way into people’s homes by asking to check residents’ identification for the upcoming census. The online hoax left Census Bureau officials scrambling to get the post removed from Facebook, concerned that census workers who were knocking doors to verify addresses could face trouble.
Cyber and census experts worry that trolls and foreign governments will sow more confusion to discourage people from participating in the census, either for political reasons or to game the allocation of resources.
Their main targets? Major U.S. internet platforms such as Google, Twitter and Facebook, according to Dipayan Ghosh, the codirector of Harvard Kennedy School’s digital platforms and democracy project.
“In terms of the bad actors that are pushing this type of content — absolutely, foreign parties, particularly Russia and China, are concerns in the case of the census, as well as domestic operators,” Ghosh added.
Government officials spend years preparing for each census, but the extent of Russia’s misinformation campaign during the last presidential elections — inaccurate and divisive images, posts and stories on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter that often went viral — wasn’t really understood until 2017.
That’s when Census Bureau leaders began to wonder if the 2020 census could be the next target, Thompson said.
“We were aware of the potential by the time I left,” said Thompson, who resigned from his post in June 2017. “We hadn’t gotten much further than that.”