Do we like Philip DeFranco?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A decent record with a proper good deed behind it, marked down because we couldn't open enough of his own words on LGBTQ+ and climate issues.
Philip DeFranco is the bloke behind The Philip DeFranco Show, one of YouTube's longest-running news-and-gossip programs. He started posting in the late 2000s and built a big independent audience from his desk. By 2020 his main channel had about 6.4 million subscribers, and YouTube picked him as one of a handful of creators to sit down with Dr Anthony Fauci.
That Fauci interview is the best harm-test evidence we found. In March 2020 YouTube lined up DeFranco, Lilly Singh, Trevor Noah and Doctor Mike to put COVID-19 questions to Fauci, so younger audiences could get public health information from people they already trusted. Platforming a public-health expert in the middle of a pandemic is the opposite of the anti-vax slide this page watches for.
His biggest moral moment came in April 2017. He pulled footage from a family prank channel called DaddyOFive, argued the stunts could amount to child mistreatment, and went through more of its videos. BuzzFeed News reported he said he was abused as a child himself, and that there are many ways to abuse a kid. The parents later apologised and made the channel private, and the children went to live with their biological mother.
What he did next counts too. DeFranco said he was getting a lot of credit for bringing the scandal to the masses, but that the real heroes were the people who raised it first. Sharing the credit when you could have kept it is a decent tell.
He has copped some heat as well. In June 2019 he objected publicly when The New York Times ran a graphic that included him in a piece about far-right radicalisation on YouTube. The Times writer said the collage was a sample of one man's viewing history, some far-right and some not, and the paper added a caption saying not all of them were. That is a dispute about how he was portrayed, not something he said or did.
Lately he has been busy. The Philip DeFranco Show won Best Independent News & Politics at the first Indie PaC Awards at SXSW in March 2026. Nothing new on him lately that counts against him, and we found no court cases or formal allegations against him.