BET Chairman and CEO Debra Lee has been appointed to serve on Twitter’s board. Lee first announced her appointment herself on Twitter Monday, saying that the company had “transformed the media and the world like few other things in history.”
Lee is in many ways a win-win for Twitter: She brings some much-needed diversity to the company’s board, while also adding further media expertise. She has been the CEO of BET for over a decade, after joining the network in 1986 as a legal counsel.
Lee is also Twitter’s first African-American board member. Twitter had in the past been criticized for a lack of diversity on its board, and the company’s executive chairman Omid Kordestani said last month that the board was working to bring more diversity to its ranks.
But Lee also has one more thing going for her: She has actually been using Twitter actively for some time, and has amassed over 67,000 followers on the platform. That sets her apart from some of her fellow board members, which haven’t been quite as active. In fact, Suntrust analyst Robert Peck demanded last year that the company should remove board members who weren’t tweeting.
