Good morning. 🇺🇸 Happy Fourth. "A sustained blast of heat is expected to bake much of the United States with hotter-than-usual temperatures," our colleague Denise Chow reports. "Forecasts suggest that the heat and the humidity could linger for several weeks."

• We sincerely hope you can step away from your screens this weekend. We're leaving you with some thoughts on the relationship between the media and the tech industry, then we're done.

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Battle lines

Silicon Valley, the tech press and 'the last 10 percent'

Moving the Market: Back in early March, in what would end up being my last trip before the lockdown, I flew up to San Francisco to interview YouTube chief Susan Wojcicki for my podcast. Much of our conversation focused on YouTube's efforts to combat harmful content, and toward the end I asked her if she worried about forever being stuck in a game of "whack-a-mole," never able to fully rid the platform of hate, violence, misinformation and so on.

Here's what she said:

• "If you look at YouTube and you look at the content that we provide, I would say 99.9 percent of it is all content that everyone would think is really valuable for our society. We do agree, like, there is this very, very small percentage that is what we think of as more controversial content. And we're working really hard to find it and remove it. And also, again, like, tighten up those policies. Do I worry about it and think about how we can do better? Yes. I'm always gonna be worrying about that. But do I think the 99.9 percent of usage is valuable? Yes."

Wojcicki surely overstated the ratio, but her sentiments match those of many tech executives I talk to. They believe their platforms have vastly improved people's ability to communicate, to create and to engage with politics and society. They also believe the vast majority of content on their platforms is good, or at the very least benign.

And yet, ⁠ever since the 2016 election — when the tech story became a political story — these executives also believe they get judged almost exclusively for their company's faults. They also think they don't get enough recognition for the steps they take to address these faults.

I thought about this last week, as the Facebook ad boycott was gaining steam and civil rights groups were demanding greater action on hate speech. Carolyn Everson, Facebook's top marketing executive, sent an email to advertisers stressing that Facebook was already doing a lot to combat hate speech. It had increased detection significantly, she said, to the point where Facebook now catches 89 percent of hate speech on its own, up from 23 percent just three years ago.

• Facebook executives love to stress this 89 percent figure. It's their version of Wojcicki's "99.9 percent." They also say that, when it comes to hate speech, overcoming the last 10-11 percent is really hard. It's relatively easy for Facebook's systems to recognize, say, nudity or terrorist content, but hate speech is nuanced. There's also a lot of content that runs right up to the line, but doesn't quite cross it.

• Facebook's efforts to highlight this progress, and the challenges they continue to face in overcoming that last 10 percent, usually don't win them much sympathy from the press. Nor, in this case, did it stop a number of big name advertisers from joining the ad boycott.

If you're a tech insider, and someone who subscribes to the belief that Silicon Valley's innovations are ultimately a force for good, it can be extremely frustrating to see the media dedicate the vast majority of its energy to highlighting your faults. "We're doing so much right!" the argument goes, "But all you care about is what we do wrong!"

• This sentiment is at the heart of a contentious Twitter fight this week that pits NYT's Taylor Lorenz and her colleagues in the media against a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists who have been badmouthing her on Clubhouse, an invite-only social media app. (Coincidentally, Lorenz wrote a great piece about Clubhouse in May).

• These VCs say the media's tech coverage is too negative and too adversarial. "When 25 of 25 emails you get from journalists are for negative stories you get a bit exhausted of dealing with it," wrote entrepreneur and investor Jason Calacanis. "You used to get 50-50 requests: one controversy and one saying 'hey, anyone doing something really innovative?'"

The disconnect between the tech industry and the media right now hinges on the differing expectations for what journalism is, and what it is supposed to do. Should tech coverage try to tell the whole story, contextualizing the faults as a small piece of the overall picture, or should it focus relentlessly on those faults — "the last 10 percent"?

• The answer is that there is no one answer. Some journalists believe that the goal of reporting is to provide a comprehensive picture of things as they are, without sensationalizing the bad just because it's bad. Others see themselves as a check-and-balance on powerful individuals and institutions who desperately need checks and balances, and so play entirely on those last 10 yards.

• At Byers Market, we tend to align with first approach, which means we spend a lot of time trying to contextualize things. But there's an obvious logic to to the latter approach, as well. Powerful individuals and institutions spend a lot of money shaping public perceptions, highlighting the good and downplaying the bad. It's reasonable for journalists to focus their efforts on cutting through that noise.

• Moreover, the last 10 percent matters — a lot. Wojcicki told me that 500 hours of content gets uploaded to YouTube every minute. Even if you believe that 99.9 percent of YouTube content is good ⁠— and again, that's way too high ⁠— you're still left with 720 hours of bad content uploaded to YouTube every single day. The content problems that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube continue to deal with are myriad, and on display on their platforms every single day.

What's next: For whatever it's worth, it seems to me like both sides would benefit from more introspection. Executives, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists might start treating their critics in the media as valuable — and free! — assets: consultants who show them the ways they can do better. Even when reporters are unfairly critical (yes, it happens), there's probably something to be learned from why they felt compelled to criticize in the first place.

• Meanwhile, those in the media who focus relentlessly on the tech industry's faults might think about doing more to contextualize those faults within the bigger picture: How much does this controversy matter? What has the individual/institution done to address the problem? What are the motives of their critics? At the very least, they might think about putting the one sentence that contextualizes the controversy in the third paragraph, rather than the thirtieth.

Market Links

• Steph Korey steps down as Away CEO (Verge)

• Amy Emmerich exits Vice's Refinery29 (Variety)

• Ben Keighran raises $113m at Caffeine (Bloomberg)

• Fred Smith puts pressure on Dan Snyder (ESPN)

• Adam Silver considers a second 'bubble' (ESPN)

🎆 What's next: The weekend.

See you Monday.