Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Thursday, August 18th. I'm Nyla Boudou.

Here's what we're following today. George's Election Interference Probe gets more politicized.

Plus, the rise of anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers. But first, today's one big thing.

Big tech raises for disinformation in the midterm elections.

After the 2020 presidential election, President Trump and his allies

waged a disinformation campaign about the election's legitimacy, focused on polling technology

and vote counting, and big tech was not ready. Now tech companies are trying to get ahead of

misinformation that could affect the coming midterms. Sarah Fisher is here to break this down

for us. Hi, Sarah. Hey, Nyla. First, why were tech companies not able to keep up

with the attempt to cast out on the legitimacy of the 2020 election results?

Leading up to the 2020 election, tech companies were focused on the types of playbooks that

they had seen in the past, which were one huge sort of state-back efforts from countries

like Russia to deploy misinformation. They were not prepared for this different type of election

interference, which was people trying to disrupt the actual act of voting through things like

misinformation around the integrity of the election misinformation around what time ballots

can be casted or how mail-in ballots work. And part of that was because we were in the middle of

the pandemic, and we had, as a country, change some of these policies, including the accessibility

and rules around mail-in ballots that made it really easy for misinformation to flourish.

And so what's driving fears of a resurgence of disinformation campaigns now?

Well, for one, we've seen in the wake of January 6 that this momentum, this movement around

challenging the integrity of the election, has only gotten stronger. You're starting to see it now

in the wake of the FBI raid, where people are calling this country a banana republic and that they're

...