Axios Harris 100: Americans still trust tech firms that deal in goods

• 75% of surveyed American adults said they are concerned about deep fakes and other generative AI content.
• The highest-scoring tech companies are Samsung, Amazon and Apple, all in the retail and hardware game.
• TikTok, Meta, and Twitter are locked in a race with Fox, the Trump Organization and failed crypto exchange FTX for the worst reputation among the top 100 brands.

Winners: The tech companies with the highest Reputational Quotient, or RQ®, scores, were Samsung (81), Amazon (80.7) and Apple (80.6), which retained their 2022 position. Sony (79.8), Microsoft (79.7), and LG (78.8) also landed in the top 20.

• Millennials ranked Google highest, though the company ranked only 35th overall.
• JP Morgan Chase beat out Apple and Paypal to receive the highest data privacy protection score.
• Made in the U.S.A. brands soared in 2023, with third-ranked John Deere leaning into “high-tech field management technologies, such as a robotic-based fertilizer system and a new electric excavator,” per Harris, to harvest a better reputation.

Losers: No social media platform ranked higher than 94th.

• Tiktok, with an RQ of 61, ranked 94th, followed by Facebook (Meta) in 97th and Twitter in 98th. All received lower RQ scores in 2023 compared to 2022.
• Meta was the company least trusted by women (only 21% gave the company a top trust rating), and the second-least trusted by Gen Z (16%), ahead of only the Trump Organization.

Yes, but: Meta is now the best performing stock of the year — more than doubling in value since January — suggesting that investors are more cheered by cost-cutting measures than worried about the company's reputation.

Between the lines: Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter hurt the social platform, and showed Tesla stakeholders weaknesses in Musk's manic leadership style.

• Tesla's reputation dropped 50 places from 12th in 2022 to 62nd place this year. No other company dropped more than 22 places.

Meanwhile, a generational split is leaving TikTok exposed, despite its large user base — paving the way for more bans on the service.

• The generational split over Tiktok's reputation is the biggest of any of the companies on the Axios Harris 100 list.
• Boomers, who occupy roughly half the seats in Congress, gave TikTok a RQ score of just 41, compared to 68.7 for Gen Z / Millennials.

• Even the Gen Z and Millennial respondents who make up TikTok's user core rank the company only 87th.

Layoffs are priced in as a cost of American business life and left firms with lo lasting reputation damage.

• No big tech company engaged in mass layoffs in recent months took a reputation hit traceable to the job cuts, and most maintained their RQ scores.

Ryan's thought bubble: People can see and somehow sense more tangible benefits from the Apples and Amazons and Samsungs.

• They employ more people because they make and sell things.
• You can see and hold those things so you process them differently from digital media.
• In most cases, you paid them money for what they offer, instead of paying in data (though sometimes it's both).
• They're less often drawn into the political controversies that divide social media users, whereas the big social platforms stoke those arguments to inflate engagement and boost profits.

Ina's thought bubble: Social media companies are likely always going to have a tougher task than hardware makers and retailers for all the reason Ryan lists.

• However, that doesn't mean the actions taken by companies in either group can't have a big impact on how they perform relative to their history and their peers.
• It wasn't that long ago (think pre-Cambridge Analytica) that Facebook and Twitter were held in much higher esteem.
• I'll be interested to see how companies such as OpenAI fare in future surveys.

Go deeper: Full results and poll methodology