Moneyshot: The Pornhub Story Review: The Problem Isn’t Sex, It’s Social Media

PornHub changed the way porn performers do business. Gwen Adora went from making and marketing her own content to using PornHub's clip site, ModelHub, to sell her content to a large audience of subscribers without having to worry about marketing any more.

This gave amateur performers an easier way of generating their own full-time income and gave porn performers who previously relied on studio-produced porn the chance to get more independence. Performers can buy their own homes as a result of the financial freedom provided by this.

Moneyshot shows that when the PornHub scandal broke, payment companies like Mastercard and Visa withdrew from the site, which took away the ability for ModelHub performers to create their own income from subscribers. It would be near impossible for someone to upload illegal content via a verified model account, so not only did this move not affect Pornhub itself, it also did little to prevent criminal activity either.

Moneyshot shines a light on this injustice, but it's flawed as a documentary because it frames the sex-trafficking scandal as a PornHub issue.

As current Supreme Court cases show, the protections of Section 230 are being questioned at far beyond the PornHub level, as lawmakers decide how much responsibility they should bear for crimes like that. The app store is cracking down on porn sites. A new tool is being backed by Meta and porn sites.

The documentary seems to skirt around the issue of sex-trafficking and illegal sexual content, despite the fact that shutting down PornHub would barely scratch the surface. The lack of age verification on adult websites and how that has led to the Online Safety Bill in the UK are both important issues.