*By Conor White*
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg may have been grilled by Congress this week, but it was the company that ditched the hearings altogether that emerged as the loser.
"If any company came out looking bad yesterday, it was probably Google," tech and social media expert Lance Ulanoff said Thursday in an interview on Cheddar.
Lawmakers wanted Google's CEO Sundar Pichai or Larry Page, head of parent company Alphabet, to testify, but only chief lawyer Kent Walker was offered, a concession that Congress ultimately [rejected](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-04/google-touts-election-steps-as-senate-panel-rejects-its-witness).
"It makes Google look like they don't care, or they're afraid," CNET News executive editor Ian Sherr told Cheddar Thursday. "And what happens is that it's going to cause Congress ー if they're really bothered, they're going to compel Google to come to The Hill."
"I certainly got the sense that there is a boiling kind of frustration at Google already on The Hill, and this did not help at all," he added.
As Wednesday's hearings unfolded, Attorney General Jeff Sessions [announced](https://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2018/09/06/wsj-city-wall-street-and-washington-put-pressure-on-social-media-fbi-probes-amex-foreign-exchange/) an official review of social media companies, probing whether Twitter and Facebook are operating in good faith. The investigation follows President Trump's claims in July that Twitter was ["shadow banning"](https://cheddar.com/videos/twitter-accused-of-shadow-banning-conservatives) conservatives by deliberately limiting the exposure of their posts.
Tech stocks fell in U.S. trading after Sessions's announcement and continued their slide on Thursday
"That kind of action could harm \[Twitter or Facebook\]," Ulanoff said. "If the Justice Department comes back and says 'this is happening' or they just pressure the company, that's going to hurt Twitter and could change Facebook, and that's got to be the fear."
As for Wednesday's hearings, both Sherr and Ulanoff agreed they were necessary fact-finding missions, pointing out that it can be exceedingly difficult to get any information out of companies as secretive as theirs.
"Silicon Valley's very opaque," Sherr said. "They don't share how the algorithms work, they don't share how the computer programs are written, they don't even share their policies very well."
The execs answered questions on troll farms, foreign actors, and identifying and eliminating fake news. Both faced the Senate, while Dorsey addressed the House alone in a separate hearing.
Still, Ulanoff thinks the social media giants are on the right track ー and the government may even learn something through the process.
"I came away thinking maybe these tech companies are doing more than the government to protect the voting process in the midterm elections." he said.
For full interview [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/getting-technical-on-the-hill).
Joe Cecela, Dream Exchange CEO, explains how they are aiming to form the first minority-controlled company to operate an exchange in U.S. history. Watch!
A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Restaurants are struggling with record-high U.S. egg prices, but their omelets, scrambles and huevos rancheros may be part of the problem. Breakfast is booming at U.S. eateries. First Watch, a restaurant chain that serves breakfast, brunch and lunch, nearly quadrupled its locations over the past decade to 570. Fast-food chains like Starbucks and Wendy's added more egg-filled breakfast items. In normal times, egg producers could meet the demand. But a bird flu outbreak that has forced them to slaughter their flocks is making supplies scarcer and pushing up prices. Some restaurants like Waffle House have added a surcharge to offset their costs.
William Falcon, CEO and Founder of Lightning AI, discusses the ongoing feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and how everyday people can use AI in their lives.
