Biden FCC Nominee Part of Nonprofit That Backs Online 'Sex Work'

One of President Joe Biden's nominees for the Federal Communications Commission sits on the board of a group pushing to uphold online "sex work," the Daily Mail reported.

Gigi Sohn, previously an aide to former FCC Chair Tom Wheeler, joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2018, a nonprofit that lobbied Congress against former President Donald Trump's anti-sex-trafficking legislation a year before.

At the time, EFF argued the new law could be used to "censor" sex work, writing that the jointly forwarded Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Acts upends Section 230 protections.

FOSTA-SESTA open "platforms to new criminal and civil liability at the state and federal levels for their users' sex trafficking activities," the group said at the time, also arguing it makes platforms liable that "promote or facilitate prostitution."

The EFF has also defended an OnlyFans "dominatrix" named Mistress Blunt, awarding her the group's Pioneer Award in 2020. At the trophy's acceptance event, Blunt claimed sex workers were indistinguishable parts of the internet.

"Sex workers were some of the first to use e-commerce platforms and the first to have personal websites," Blunt said. "The rapid growth of countless tech platforms was reliant on the early adoption of sex workers."

However, "not all sex workers have equitable access to technologies or the Internet," she continued. "This means that digital freedom for sex workers means equitable access to technologies."

An EFF spokesman told the Daily Mail that Sohn was not involved in selecting Blunt for the Pioneer Award and could not confirm if she would step down if confirmed for the FCC position.

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