Instagram's own research said 32% of teen girls felt worse about their bodies because of the app. Senator Ed Markey reads those numbers back to Adam Mosseri on the video, including the share of teen users who traced thoughts of suicide to it. Mosseri corrects that one figure, 1% and not 6%, and says any loss of life is a tragedy. Nothing here was about breaking a law. The questions were about what parents can switch off, and that is the part a company decides on its own. Asked to back a bill letting 13 to 15 year olds wipe their data, he answers that 13 isn't a magic number. Teens lie about their age anyway. Will he back a ban on targeting ads at children, yes or no. He believes it's valuable for ads to be relevant. Markey tries once more and gets the same shape of answer, then says out loud that the answers are too vague to legislate on. Another senator had already told him his questions were yes or no questions. That hearing was in December 2021, and the bill they kept asking about still isn't law.

Over 85% of online searches in the US go through Google. In this video the chairman of an antitrust panel asks Sundar Pichai why his company steals content from honest businesses. David Cicilline reads one case into the record first. A man called Brian Warner watched traffic to his site drop 80% after Google changed what it showed, and he laid off half his staff. Warner's line is the part that sticks: if someone came to him with an idea for a website today, he'd tell them to run. Strip out the word steal and the question stays. Who decides which businesses get found, and that call sits inside one company. Pichai says he disagrees with the characterization. He had met small businesses just last week. Then come the numbers he brought. 1.4M small businesses supported, $385B of activity, and a Texas company selling kettlebells. Cicilline cuts in. The question was specific, and he says the answer doesn't match what months of investigation turned up. That was July 2020. In August 2024 a federal judge ruled Google had kept its search monopoly illegally, partly by paying to be the default everywhere.

Theranos was valued at $9B. In this video the SEC sits Elizabeth Holmes in front of a camera and asks how many tests her machine could actually run. She doesn't know. Probably tens of them, she says, which she agrees means fewer than 100, and she can't name anyone who would know. A lawyer asks whether those tests were validated. They were validated by what the company understood validation to mean back then, she says, and that understanding changed later. Asked who read the guidance document they validated against, she names whoever ran assay development. Asked who that was, she doesn't know. The machine gets three names in one answer: the mini lab, the 4 series, and the Edison. Walgreens supplied the first one during due diligence. By then Walgreens had it running in 40 Arizona drugstores, where ordinary people walked in and had blood drawn. Theranos later admitted more than 1 in 10 results given to Arizona customers were voided or corrected, and paid $4.65M back to about 76,000 of them. Across these sessions she says some version of "I don't know" more than 600 times. She was the one person paid to know.