Twitter Grows Public Policy Team With Former FCC Staffer Colin Crowell
BY Nick Judd | Monday, August 29 2011
Twitter's public policy team grows with the addition of former FCC senior counselor Colin Crowell, whose hiring was announced Monday. Photo: Andy Melton / Flickr
A top former staffer at the Federal Communications Commission is becoming Twitter's head of global public policy, the company announced Monday.
Colin Crowell, currently a policy and strategic communications consultant with his own firm, was also a top telecommunications staffer for Rep. Ed Markey for 20 years. Crowell was senior counselor to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski from 2009 to 2010. Politico's Kim Hart was first to report this news.
"Have pushed open exchange of information in tech policy for 20+ yrs," Crowell wrote Monday on Twitter. "No better place to apply that belief than Twitter. Look forward to it."
Crowell joins Twitter's government liaison, Adam Sharp, in the ranks of staffers with a bent towards policy or politics — but those aren't the only two Twitter staffers with a D.C. pedigree. Last year, Twitter hired former Google and U.S. State Department veteran Katie Stanton as head of international strategy. Facebook, too, has been staffing up on the policy front: In May, Facebook hired two former Bush White House staffers to join its domestic policy team.
Both social networks send reps to meet with members of Congress, nearly all of whom — as Hart notes — are users of Facebook, Twitter or both. House Democrats and Republicans both have groups of staffers devoted to sussing out social media strategies for their members, but the social graph that includes electeds and social network execs is for more than just sharing best practices.
Crowell's hiring comes one week after Twitter was one of several companies to meet with British officials to discuss their products' role in the London riots, where BlackBerry Messenger was a communications tool for rioters and ersatz cleanup crews alike. At the start of the riots, some news outlets immediately sought an angle on them that seemed to suggest that Twitter, too, was to blame. At the meeting, British officials put to rest rumors started by Prime Minister David Cameron that the government would consider squelching access to social media to some people during times of crisis.
Domestically, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Google and other companies are members of the Open Internet Coalition, a trade group that is involved in the ongoing negotiations over the shape of America's Internet to come — an important policy fight if ever there was one.