WASHINGTON — Gigi Sohn, a well-regarded consumer advocate and board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), announced that she would withdraw from her nomination for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). After an extremely aggressive campaign that questioned virtually every aspect of her life — her education, career, political positions, personal life, and (most egregiously) her sexuality.
“The unrelenting, dishonest and cruel attacks on my character and my career as an advocate for the public interest have taken an enormous toll on me and my family,” Sohn said in a statement to the press last week. “Unfortunately, the American people are the real losers here.”
And losers the American people will remain. It is no secret that I supported Sohn to fill the fifth and vacant seat on a partisan-split panel. In fact, YNOT published a report of mine on Sohn’s nomination and how she has renewed hope moving forward.
Upon a review of the smear campaign against Sohn, there is a clear anti-porn twist that was coordinated across right-wing media outlets and organizations that are backed by the telecom giants who openly oppose concepts Sohn is known to advocate for. This includes net neutrality.
For example, the far-right news outlet Breitbart published a hit piece that attempted to “implicate” Sohn for her involvement with the EFF. Or, in the words of Breitbart writer Allum Bokhari, Sohn is a “far-left” nominee who is involved with a group that “defends online ‘sex work’ and gave an award to a dominatrix who boasts about urinating on people’s faces.” Of course, he refers to EFF awarding Mistress Blunt their Pioneer Award. Mistress Blunt is a popular adult performer and advocates for sexual expression on the internet.
Mistress Blunt was also called Sohn’s favorite dominatrix, in an attempt to further implicate Sohn — a proud LGBTQ woman — in some conspiracy-riddled concept that a far-left cabal is looking to sexualize minors somehow and is engaged in human trafficking. This is all bull.
This is the real information: Sohn is a lawyer with more than thirty years of experience in litigating technology and privacy law cases. She was also a senior aide to former FCC chair Tom Wheeler and is considered to be one of the leading minds behind the Obama-era order to make the internet open via net neutrality regulations. Serving on the board of the EFF for many years, she has been a staunch supporter of freedom of speech on the internet, including protecting the rights of adult performers and online sex work.
Sohn holds policy positions in support of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, the “First Amendment of the internet,” which grants safe harbor to online platforms to self-regulate against harmful and illegal content that goes against terms and conditions.
Sohn’s affiliation with the EFF was further called into question by other right-wing outlets, like Fox News and the U.S. edition of The Daily Mail. EFF, among other organizations like the Free Speech Coalition, openly opposed the passage of FOSTA-SESTA. A Trump-era bill that was passed in an attempt to counter sex trafficking, FOSTA-SESTA turned out to be a mess dreamt up by a coalition of religious anti-porn groups claiming to be “secular,” “abolitionistic,” and “feminist” to counter the apparent crisis of sexual exploitation in our society.
These groups include the highly controversial National Center on Sexual Exploitation and the religious-conservative Exodus Cry group. EFF held that FOSTA-SESTA censors otherwise legal and protected forms of speech online, including content that deals with commercial sex. This position turned out to be true, as thousands of online sex workers and adult performers were censored and forced away from using the greatest invention of all time. That invention is the ability to remotely vet potential clients and capitalize on the relative safety of the web.
EFF also said that FOSTA-SESTA “will not stop sex trafficking and will instead make stopping it harder.” EFF, with the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, has been trying to persuade the courts that FOSTA-SESTA is unconstitutional. But, that’s beside the point now. Organizations and politicians that are also critical of Sohn included religious and far-right conservative groups who believed that she would use her power, once named to the FCC to censor conservative viewpoints on the internet. This is political gaslighting too, given that Sohn has openly worked to provide space on the internet for all viewpoints through her advocacy for the net neutrality rule and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.
But, the most disgusting element of this smear campaign is the questioning and ridicule of Sohn’s personal life. If you enter public life, you can expect criticism in just about every form. However, Sohn’s smear campaign is something else. Preston Padden, a former president of the ABC Television Network and one of the founding Fox Broadcasting Company executives, sent a letter to Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation calling the “press stories ginned up by Ms. Sohn’s opponents are beneath scurrilous and are beneath the dignity of this committee.” Mr. Padden added that Sohn’s “opponents have planted article after article alleging that she is against Native Americans, against Hispanics, against rural communities, against police and that she is connected with illicit sex workers.” He said: “It’s all rubbish!”
“A total of 375 organizations, companies, elected officials, and local governments, including numerous Tribes, Hispanic organizations, and public safety officials have voiced their support for Ms. Sohn’s nomination,” Mr. Padden continued in his letter. NBC News journalists and
LGBTQ groups have expressed their anger at Sohn’s treatment by telecom-backed beltway right-wingers. Groups like LGBTQ Victory Fund and the National LGBTQ Task Force sent a letter in February criticizing the Senate and calling it “past time” for Ms. Sohn to be nominated.
