A poll carried out by Reuters and Ipsos on whether the Galaxy Note7 recall damaged Samsung's brand in the US has thrown up rather dubious findings.
The poll was released overnight in San Francisco and published with the headline, "Galaxy Note7 recall did not damage Samsung brand in US: Reuters/Ipsos poll".
But buried in the story was this sentence: "To be sure, it was unclear how much the Samsung recall weighed on the minds of consumers. The Reuters/Ipsos poll measured how interested people were in buying Samsung phones, not how much the recall directly influenced their decisions."
This appears to contradict the conclusion proclaimed in the headline.
And, casting even more doubt on what the survey claimed to have concluded, the Reuters story quoted Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research as saying the recall was mostly limited to early adopters rather than the majority of Samsung's customer base, which limited negative user experiences.
"Your own personal experience trumps what you read and what people tell you," Dawson was quoted as saying.
The poll was conducted online in all 50 US states and included 2375 users who own Samsung phones and 3158 people who own iPhones.
The publication of the poll results comes in the wake of a major debate over the extent to which fake news stories on Facebook and Google influenced the results of the recent US federal election.