Google allegedly punished award-winning YouTuber for not endorsing Clinton

Phillip DeFranco — a.k.a. PhillyD — is a popular YouTube content creator who has been making commentary and news videos for over a decade, with well over four million subscribers. His primary draw, The Phillip DeFranco Show, recently won a "Streamy Award" for Show of the &ear.

So naturally, DeFranco should be a part of YouTube's yearly "YouTube rewind," which celebrates exceptional content creators, and the most viral videos seen that year in a very fun and creative way. The video itself is highly-trafficked, and helps to further promote YouTube's content creators in a big way. Surely, someone who won a "Streamy" for Show of the Year would be prominently featured.

But DeFranco is not, and according to him, it's for political reasons.

Addressing questions from his viewers in a recent video, DeFranco answered one from a woman named Charlie Gamache, who asked why he was not included in the "Rewind" video. DeFranco responded by telling a hypothetical story about a company that owns a video sharing channel that asked him to create an endorsement video for a specific candidate, and upon refusing to do so, "theoretically" excluded him from its yearly celebration video.

Watch his explantation below.

While YouTube features the yearly rewind video, YouTube itself is owned by Google, which is the company DeFranco is referencing in his hypothetical tale. This means that if DeFranco's story is true, Google is requesting that major YouTube content creators make videos endorsing Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and punishing them if they fail to do so.

This would not be the first time DeFranco and YouTube have butted heads. Very recently, DeFranco was hit with a "violation of terms of service" by the streaming company for commenting negatively about a social justice warrior who verbally abused a Lyft driver.

Interestingly enough, Google was wrapped up in accusations that it was rigging search results that cast Clinton in a positive light. A video was even made to show evidence of this. Google, of course, denied the claim, but if DeFranco's story is factual, then it would not be too hard to believe that many of the accusations thrown at the search engine are true.