Thread by @QuinnyPig

It sure is brave of Congress to livestream their performance review with the four tech CEOs.

Let's not delude ourselves about who owns who here.

I see @davidcicilline's assistant is wearing a mask, but he isn't because he is Too Important for such trivialities.

You'd really think that "learning to read aloud without sounding like you're reading aloud" would be a skill you'd master at some point between "deciding to run for office" and "becoming the ranking member of a House subcommittee," but apparently not.

Okay, @Jim_Jordan has an actual personality and stage presence.

Unfortunately he uses it to prosecute some bizarre culture war about content on platforms. Dear lord.

So you get @JeffBezos, @sundarpichai, @finkd, and @tim_cook to testify, and you use your time to... whine about Twitter? Really?

And now the congesscritters snipe at one another and it devolves into talking over one another.

Reading the resumes of the tech CEOs as if they were somehow relevant. @sundarpichai being ex-McKinsey is about as relevant as what underpants he's wearing in the context of this hearing.

Nice visuals, @Webex.

We start with @JeffBezos's prepared 4700 word statement. You can read it here. blog.aboutamazon.com/policy/stateme…

Thankfully he's limited to only 5 minutes of that monstrosity.

Credit where due, Google solved the crappy video problem first.

I can't tell if he's using a cheap webcam, or it's Webex compression artifacting.

Concerned Tim Cook cares about democracy.

He's not charismatic, he can't tie a tie to save his life, and his company is actively ruining democracy, but what about Zuckerberg's good qualities?

"In many ways we're behind our competitors." Yeah, Zuck. Particularly "ethically."

I maintain good people don't work for Facebook.

"I will now recognize myself for five minutes." Looks like Rekognition got wedged until a Lambda times out again!

Interrupts Sundar Pichai with: "Google has stolen content to build your own business." Whoa. Accurate. But whoa.

"We only show ads on Google for a small subset of queries."

Yes, you can go weeks without seeing an ad on Google.com, right? Right?

"First Google stole other pages' content, then when Yelp asked you to stop stealing their reviews your response was to threaten to delist Yelp entirely."

"We conduct ourselves to the highest standard" is @sundarpichai's weak-sauce response.

"Yes or no" seems to be a question Zuckerberg doesn't know how to answer.

Credit where due, Zuck had a super innovative answer to the Trolley Problem.

"Why shouldn't Instagram be broken off into a separate company?"
"The FTC didn't say we had to do that."

And now @RepKenBuck will attempt to ask a question relevant to the proceedings. Can he do it?

"Mr. Pichai, Google dropped out of JEDI. Your stated reason was that the military's project didn't align with Google's mission and principles. Months later a US general testified that the Chinese military directly benefited from Google's work."

"What's to stop Apple from increasing its 30% fee to 50%?"

"Well we never have before."

"There's competition for developers" says @tim_cook.

Yeah, that doesn't hold water. Developers have to be where their customers are. If Apple raised the fee to 50%, developers would absolutely have to pay it.

"Zuck, you said Facebook was an American company with American values." Wow, you must hate America to say that.

"Will you commit to not working with anti-police protests?"

@sundarpichai
"We have a long history of working with law enforcement when supported by law and due process."

I'd love to hear how @mattgaetz gets to "the anti-police protests are bigoted." Just kidding, it'd be trash.

"Our AI work in China is limited to a handful of people working on open source projects."

Now smacking Zuckerberg for election influencing fake accounts on Facebook.

Something that stands out in stark contrast here: Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, and Sundar Pichai are, despite their flaws, inspirational leaders. I can't imagine sitting down for a lunch with any of them and not coming away impressed, and liking them on a personal level.

Zuck is not.

Now they have to fix a technical feed issue with one of their witnesses.

$5 says @jeffbezos is having conflicts between WebEx and his beloved Amazon Chime.

And recess is over. Now @RepArmstrongND is hitting Google for bias against conservatives.

It's striking how *SMART* Google is, yet how little savvy they demonstrate.

Finally @RepJayapal has the microphone. She's asking @jeffbezos about Amazon using third party data to inform its own product developments.

"You can set the rules for your competitors but don't have to follow them yourself. Do you think that's fair?"

Wow. @RepJayapal *apologized* to @jeffbezos for cutting him off "because her time is expiring."

She's a fucking congressperson and still felt the social need to apologize. None of her whiteguy peers have done so. Witness white supremacy in action.

My rule of thumb that's not yet found an exception: when a representative is a woman of color, expect her to be head and shoulders above her white guy peers.

She's done her freaking homework.

Now @RepGregSteube hits @sundarpichai about how Google censors conservative websites.

His point is complete bullshit and the way he asked it belied a complete lack of understanding, but it's kinda funny watching Sundar fail to answer effectively.

"Why did my father's emails not get to me" is the most ridiculous line of questioning I've heard so far.

"What assurances do we have that your employees can't affect the antispam algorithms to reflect political bias?"

Oh my god, I've got a very vague idea of how G-Suite spam filtering works, and I can't even begin to picture how I'd explain it to a layperson.

At least Zuckerberg fixed his tie.