Siri Dahl in Money Shot: The Pornhub Story (Netflix)

By volume of traffic, pornography is the most popular subject on the Internet. The new Netflix documentary Money Shot: The Pornhub Story traces the evolution of Pornhub, the most popular porn website in the world, and sheds light on how conservative forces have utilized insurgent leftism in ways that are quite unprecedented and disturbing.

There are a number of pitfalls that Money Shot could have fallen into, but it avoids all of them, and instead focuses on the more compelling story of what the campaign to destroy Pornhub tells us about current social dynamics. The filmmakers provide some of the history of Pornhub—a Canadian software company, MindGeek, owns it. While informative, this isn’t breaking news. The journalist Jon Ronson covered this in detail on his popular podcast years ago. You might also expect the documentary to extensively cover the lives of porn content creators and how the moralistic crackdown on Pornhub has made the lives of sex workers more difficult. There is some of that here, but the film as a whole does not consist of their sob stories.

The film in part traces the efforts of Laila Mickelwait, an active Twitter user who almost singlehandedly got the public to associate Pornhub with sex trafficking. She started the hashtag #TraffickingHub and relentlessly promoted the idea that Pornhub knowingly permitted and profited from content that had connections to sex trafficking, rape, pedophilia, and other monstrosities. While there was, and perhaps still is, a huge amount of content on Pornhub that violates all forms of ethics, her campaign was a clear attempt to brand the entirety of the website as criminal.

Mickelwait used techniques of today’s leftism—cancel culture frenzy, outrage, performative indignation, and so on—to get millions of people to sign a petition to shut down Pornhub. She called her crusade a war with “Big Porn,” drawing parallels to the populist ire against Big Tech. She also called for holding employees of Pornhub accountable for being complicit with rape. The documentary points out that Mickelwait works as the director of abolition at Exodus Cry, a Christian nonprofit advocacy organization. Though Mickelwait is not interviewed, Dani Pinter, the senior legal counsel for the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), appears before director Suzanne Hillinger’s camera.

Pinter describes her work for the NCOSE as exposing the web of sexual exploitation, which is a necessary goal, but the question arises: Where is the line of what constitutes exploitation drawn? Many Pornhub performers are basically exploiting themselves as a business choice. This has to be distinguished from exploitation without consent. The NCOSE was known as Morality in Media until 2015, when it rebranded itself around the issue of opposing exploitation. When that organization was founded by three interfaith clergymen in the early 1960s, it was known as Operation Yorkville.

Eventually, this crusade caught the attention of prominent New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof, who wrote a story highlighting the experiences of a teenaged girl who had her private material uploaded to Pornhub against her wishes, and the difficulty she had in getting it removed. Her story was sadly one of many such cases. This fueled the fire, and the documentary offers a good case study in how moral panic works today and spreads, especially on Twitter, and features lots of screenshots of outraged tweets after the article comes out. When the tweets are all strung together, you see how people glom onto an alarming issue they just learned about five minutes ago, and seem to care a lot about it, thus helping reactionary forces achieve their goal.

There have been campaigns against porn forever, but usually just from conservative perspectives. The #TraffickingHub campaign was different because it had a kind of left-wing orientation, or seemed to. Despite all of its heavy social insight, Money Shot is a fairly easy watch, and doesn’t get bogged down in details, despite touching on so many areas. It’s highly recommended for understanding how right-wingers use left-wing social media techniques to achieve their goals to crack down on the free speech within the porn industry.