Misinformation about voting and election denialism didn't swamp the midterms as many experts had feared — and many election deniers on the ballot, particularly for the crucial secretary-of-state roles, lost their races.

How it works: Platforms, governments and the media took countermeasures that were at least partially effective, based on their lessons from 2016, 2018 and 2020.

• "Denialism narratives are still out there circulating," Jared Holt, senior research manager at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told Axios. "The difference here is that they just don't seem to be exciting people like they did in 2020."
• "It's hard to say how much of that is attributable to [actions from] tech platforms, and how much is just general public sentiment," Holt said.

Details: Experts say voting mis- and disinformation didn't have the same impact on this year's contest compared to the 2020 election.

• Though misinformation remains present in large quantities, this time it had less reach, was more spread out and was harder to find.

What they're saying: "The amount of content we saw that you could call kind of election disinformation was actually larger than what we saw in 2020 — but overall, the effects were much more muted," said Alex Stamos, director at the Stanford Internet Observatory, on Stanford Law School's "Moderated Content" podcast last week.

• Stamos, who runs a non-partisan coalition called Election Integrity Partnership, said he and his colleagues expected a much more...

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