The latest from the Brand Misinformation Index: Samsung

After three months of tracking brand exposure to misinformation, we've been able to identify a number of headline trends, as Tesla, J.P.Morgan and AMEX alternate places at the index's summit.

It's also allowed us to view subtler shifts in perception as they develop amongst brands who ostensibly have less reason to worry - but may see today's misinformation rebound as actively harmful narratives in future. 

This week, the focus is on Samsung. 

The index, the result of a singular product integration between audience intelligence platform Pulsar and NewsGuard, is updated every week. By providing the insight of trained journalists as an additional data source in Pulsar, it helps users gain a more complete and nuanced understanding of misinformation. 

You can access the live index by clicking here. 

So what's the story with Samsung? It's currently sat in a very innocuous looking 19th. But what are the narratives behind the data? 

The growing US-China tensions over semiconductors have seen Samsung implicated in conversations touching on fragile geopolitics. This was brought to a head in early August, when Nancy Pelosi's trip to Taiwan saw the brand's misinformation risk score leap upwards by a massive 553.4%.

While the conversation playing out on untrustworthy sites has not seen any comparable spike since, the growing conversation around semiconductors and chips has nonetheless dragged the brand's score upwards over time.

Some of these conversations reference Samsung in relation to British semiconductor manufacturers ARM, as untrustworthy finance publications speculate on the relative strength of industry players. But a greater number of mentions have followed on the heels of the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act – which incentivises domestic manufacturing. Since then, Chinese state-aligned publishers have consistently framed Samsung as an accomplice in the US's attempts to maintain monopolies and exclude China from the global chip market. 

As the global competition for items of infrastructural importance intensifies, and brands find themselves increasingly implicated in issues of domestic security, we can expect to see conversations around technology brands become more and more politicised.