Epstein said he was disappointed by Pichai's showing in Congress, noting the executive was "simply repeating things his mentor said over and over for years — that's Eric Schmidt. He also seemed to borrow a few lines from Mark Zuckerberg: he just kept saying over and over again, ‘We'll look into that.' Then he said, ‘This is our policy' in answer to a lot of questions. You know, he basically didn't tell too many outright lies — he told a couple of them — but not too many outright lies. He just gave very misleading answers."
Epstein noted the incredible power Google has "to shift opinions and votes with no one aware that they're being manipulated."
Confronted with this, the Judiciary Committee "didn't ask any of the tough questions, and even on some very simple questions they just let Pichai get away with a very, very misleading answer. For example, at one point he was asked: ‘If you, the user, delete your data from Google, do you really delete it, or is it just hidden?' And Pichai says, ‘It takes time for the deletion to propagate through our system, but yes, it's really deleted.' If you read Google's terms of service carefully, it says it might take up to six months to delete your data, number one; and number two, it also says, ‘And we have a right to preserve your data indefinitely if it serves the company.' That's what it says. So it's just nonsense, it's evasiveness, it's misleading answers, and we need to do better."
"These companies serve the Democrats," Epstein said of Google and Twitter, "and so the Democrats like these companies quite a bit."