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Thomas Scott is an English
YouTuber and
web developer. His self-titled
YouTube channel offers educational videos across a range of topics including history, geography, linguistics, science, and technology. As of January 2024,[update] his five YouTube channels have collectively gained over 7.79 million subscribers[a] and 1.86 billion views.[b][2]
While at university in 2004, he produced a website parodying the British government's "
Preparing for Emergencies" website,[8] including a section explaining what to do in case of a
zombie apocalypse. This resulted in the
Cabinet Office demanding the site be deleted, to which Scott sent a "polite response declining to take down the site".[4][5][9]
In 2009, Scott became the official UK organiser of
International Talk Like a Pirate Day,[10] and was subsequently nominated by his friends to run for student president at the
University of York Students' Union, under the guise of his Talk Like a Pirate Day persona, "Mad Cap'n Tom Scott". Despite running as a joke, he gained almost 3,000 votes, won the election, and served as the organisation's 48th president.[11] When running for
Parliament in the
Cities of London and Westminster constituency as a
joke candidate in 2010, Scott used the character – at the time, he described his chances of winning in the safe
Conservative seat of Westminster as "Somewhere 'twixt a snowball's chance in hell an' zero."[12] He received 84 votes (0.2% of the total), finishing in last place behind
Pirate Party UK.[13]
Career
Early career
In 2012 Scott was a presenter in the
Sky 1 series Gadget Geeks alongside
Colin Furze and Creative Technologist Charles Yarnold, where he was responsible for the creation of
software solutions.[14]
Scott received coverage in 2013 for "Actual Facebook Graph Searches", a
Tumblr site which exposed a potentially embarrassing and dangerous collection of public
Facebook data using Facebook's Graph Search, such as showing men in
Tehran who have said that they were "interested in men" or "single women who live nearby and are interested in men and like getting drunk".[15]
YouTube career
Scott produces and uploads educational videos to the channel across a range of topics including
linguistics,
technology,
geography,
history and
science. His output has included series such as Language Files (which focuses on linguistics and languages), The Basics (which covers issues to do with computing and IT), Amazing Places (which, as the name suggests, focuses on geographical locations), and Things You Might Not Know. Typically his videos take the form of relatively short videos on interesting items, with many having received external coverage including colours unable to be recorded accurately on video,[16] compact hovercraft,[17] and how bear-resistant infrastructure is tested.[18]
Scott has also collaborated with other YouTubers, including challenging YouTuber
Jordan Harrod to create a
deepfake version of him for $100.[19]
Scott announced that he was taking a break from his YouTube work starting 1 January 2024, after a decade of consistent weekly uploads. "I am so tired. There's nothing in my life right now except work" he explained, although it was his "dream job". Scott believed YouTube made it impossible to reduce the quality of his videos. Thus he saw his only other option as expanding further and hiring staff, forcing him to "become a manager", which he deemed beyond his skills. Soon after, he noted that other YouTubers with similar long-form content were also reducing or stepping away as views and ad-revenue fall. Scott predicted "difficult years" ahead given the rise of "junk zero-effort
generative AI channels" and competing video options.[20]
The Technical Difficulties
Scott is a member of the four-person
comedy troupe, The Technical Difficulties, with whom he hosted a radio show of the same name on
University Radio York which won the
Kevin Greening award at the
Student Radio Awards in 2008.[21] The group has created several podcasts and video series over the years including:[22]
Series
Duration
The Reverse Trivia Podcast
2010–2014
Citation Needed
2014–2018
Two of These People Are Lying
2019–2021
Adventures
2022–2023
Lateral with Tom Scott
A weekly comedy podcast taking the format of a game show where Tom and three contestants take turns asking each other difficult questions with strange answers, which was adapted from a 2018 six-episode game show on Scott's main YouTube channel that was also co-developed with David Bodycombe.[23][24][25]
Scott has kept the podcast going beyond 2024 despite indefinitely pausing his weekly
YouTube release schedule.[26]
Other work
In 2014, Scott co-founded
Emojli along with Matt Gray. It was a parody
emoji-only social network inspired by
Yo. Emojli was described by Salon as "an inside joke turned into reality".[27][28] It closed in July 2015 after it became too expensive to maintain.[29] In September 2015, Scott created a full-size
emoji keyboard out of fourteen standard keyboards to type every standard Unicode emoji.[30]
Other web apps Scott has created include "Evil", a web app that revealed the phone numbers of Facebook users;[32][33] "Tweleted", which showed posts deleted from Twitter;[34] "What's Osama bin Watchin?", which mashed together an image of
Osama bin Laden with YouTube
Internet memes;[35] "Parliament WikiEdits", a
Twitter bot that tweets whenever an
IP address from the
Houses of Parliament edited Wikipedia, which inspired a wave of similar accounts including
CongressEdits;[36] and "Klouchebag", a satire of the social media rankings site
Klout.[37][38]