Twitter#PAC will give company executives and employees a way to steer donations. Twitter hires a #lobbyist

Twitter is coming to K Street.

The company confirmed to POLITICO on Friday that it would form a new political action committee and register a federal lobbyist for the first time.


Twitter#PAC — a play on the site’s hashtag function — will give company executives and employees a way to steer donations to federal candidates, while company policy manager William Carty will officially register to lobby on the company’s behalf.

“We expect to continue to play an active role in speaking up on issues related to internet freedom, government access to user data, patent reform and freedom of expression,” Twitter spokesperson Jim Prosser said in a statement.

The newly registered lobbyist Carty formerly served as policy director for Republicans on the Senate Commerce Committee. He joined the company’s office in Washington as its second public policy staffer last fall.

The company has also hired former Senate staffer Nu Wexler as Twitter’s spokesman on policy and political issues. Wexler previously served in Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s (D-Conn) office.

The moves come as Congress and President Barack Obama grapple with the fallout from revelations that the National Security Agency has a robust digital and telecommunications monitoring program. Twitter was not among the nine tech companies identified in a leaked NSA slide about a monitoring program called PRISM.

In a rare Friday news conference, Obama dedicated a significant amount of time to privacy and national security issues — defending the surveillance programs while proposing a handful of small reforms.

The company — which has about 200 million active users — has long advocated on privacy, access and communication issues.

But the addition of a lobbyist and a PAC gives the company new tools to work on issues relevant to their bottom line. Twitter joins other major tech companies — including Microsoft, Google, Facebook — in establishing a Beltway-based influence arm.

Those tech companies have been far more active than Twitter. Microsoft, for example, counts 23 firms on staff, as well as several in-house lobbyists. Microsoft’s political giving topped $2 million in 2012, while Facebook and Google company PACs also spent heavily.

News of the company’s PAC and lobbyist was first reported by the Washington Post.