Smear campaign targets nominee who would be FCC’s first openly gay commissioner

A campaign to block the appointment of a commissioner to the Federal Communications Commission has turned ugly.

A campaign to block the appointment of a commissioner to the Federal Communications Commission has turned ugly.

Gigi Sohn, who was first nominated in October 2021 to complete the FCC’s lineup of five commissioners, was recently the target of articles by DailyMail.com and FoxNews.com that sought to connect her work with a leading digital rights group to sex trafficking and a dominatrix. Sohn is on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF, a widely respected nonprofit that advocates for privacy and free expression online.

Those articles came after what has been a particularly long wait to have Sohn approved by the Senate, and they’ve triggered growing outrage.

“The press stories ginned up by Ms. Sohn’s opponents are beneath scurrilous and are beneath the dignity of this Committee,” wrote Preston Padden, a former president of ABC Television Network and a founding executive of Fox Broadcast Co., in a recent letter to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. 

Both articles referred to the EFF’s opposition to a law known as FOSTA-SESTA that aimed to crack down on websites for knowingly facilitating sex trafficking that was opposed by much of the tech community. The Daily Mail also pointed out that the EFF honored a dominatrix with its “pioneer award” for what the nonprofit said was her “research into sex work and equitable access to technology from a public health perspective” in relation to FOSTA-SESTA.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/fcc-gigi-sohn-nomination-turns-ugly-rcna68224

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