Thomas Scott is an English YouTuber and

web developer A web developer is a programmer who develops World Wide Web applications using a client–server model. The applications typically use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in the client, and any general-purpose programming language in the server. is used f ...

. His self-titled

YouTube YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...

channel offers educational videos across a range of topics including history, geography, linguistics, science, and technology. his five YouTube channels have collectively gained over million subscribers and billion views.

Early life

Thomas Scott was born in

Mansfield Mansfield is a market town and the administrative centre of Mansfield District in Nottinghamshire, England. It is the largest town in the wider Mansfield Urban Area (followed by Sutton-in-Ashfield). It gained the Royal Charter of a market tow ...

Nottinghamshire Nottinghamshire (; abbreviated Notts.) is a landlocked county in the East Midlands region of England, bordering South Yorkshire to the north-west, Lincolnshire to the east, Leicestershire to the south, and Derbyshire to the west. The traditi ...

, and graduated from the

University of York , mottoeng = On the threshold of wisdom , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £8.0 million , budget = £403.6 million , chancellor = Heather Melville , vice_chancellor = Charlie Jeffery , students ...

with a degree in

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

and the English language. He later earned a

Master of Arts A Master of Arts ( la, Magister Artium or ''Artium Magister''; abbreviated MA, M.A., AM, or A.M.) is the holder of a master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The degree is usually contrasted with that of Master of Science. Tho ...

in educational studies. While at university in 2004, he produced a website parodying the British government's " Preparing for Emergencies" website, including a section explaining what to do in case of a zombie apocalypse. This resulted in the

Cabinet Office The Cabinet Office is a department of His Majesty's Government responsible for supporting the prime minister and Cabinet. It is composed of various units that support Cabinet committees and which co-ordinate the delivery of government objecti ...

demanding the site be deleted, to which Scott sent a "polite response declining to take down the site". In 2009, Scott became the official UK organiser of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and was subsequently nominated by his friends to run for student president at the

University of York Students' Union University of York Students' Union (YUSU) is the representative body for the students at the University of York, England. It provides representation for all students, is the key provider of entertainment and welfare services, and operates a ran ...

, 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. When running for

Parliament In modern politics, and history, a parliament is a legislative body of government. Generally, a modern parliament has three functions: Representation (politics), representing the Election#Suffrage, electorate, making laws, and overseeing ...

in the

Cities of London and Westminster Cities of London and Westminster (also known as City of London and Westminster South from 1974 to 1997) is a constituency returning a single Member of Parliament (MP) to the House of Commons in the United Kingdom Parliament. It is a borough ...

constituency as a

joke candidate A frivolous party or a joke party is a political party which has been created for the purposes of entertainment or political satire. Such a party may or may not have a serious point behind its activities. This is a list of frivolous political par ...

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." He received 84 votes (0.2% of the total), finishing in last place behind

Pirate Party UK The Pirate Party UK (often abbreviated PPUK; in cy, Plaid Môr-leidr DU) was a political party in the United Kingdom. The Pirate Party's core policies were to bring about reform to copyright and patent laws, support privacy, reduce surveillance f ...

Career

Early career

In 2012 Scott was a presenter in the Sky 1 series ''

Gadget Geeks ''Gadget Geeks'' is a British television series that aired on Sky1, and focused on technology and gadgets. The series differed to the Channel 5 series ''The Gadget Show'', in that it did not just feature commercially available technology, but ...

'' alongside Colin Furze and Creative Technologist Charles Yarnold, where he was responsible for the creation of

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

solutions. Scott received coverage in 2013 for "Actual Facebook Graph Searches", a

Tumblr Tumblr (stylized as tumblr; pronounced "tumbler") is an American microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a sho ...

site which exposed a potentially embarrassing and dangerous collection of public

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

data using Facebook's Graph Search, such as showing men in

Tehran Tehran (; fa, تهران ) is the largest city in Tehran Province and the capital of Iran. With a population of around 9 million in the city and around 16 million in the larger metropolitan area of Greater Tehran, Tehran is the most popul ...

who have said that they were "interested in men" or "single women who live nearby and are interested in men and like getting drunk".

YouTube career

Scott produces and uploads educational videos to the channel across a range of topics including

technology Technology is the application of knowledge to reach practical goals in a specifiable and reproducible way. The word ''technology'' may also mean the product of such an endeavor. The use of technology is widely prevalent in medicine, science, ...

geography Geography (from Greek: , ''geographia''. Combination of Greek words ‘Geo’ (The Earth) and ‘Graphien’ (to describe), literally "earth description") is a field of science devoted to the study of the lands, features, inhabitants, and ...

history History (derived ) is the systematic study and the documentation of the human activity. The time period of event before the History of writing#Inventions of writing, invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbr ...

and

science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...

. 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, compact hovercraft, and how bear-resistant infrastructure is tested. Scott has also collaborated with other YouTubers, including challenging YouTuber

Jordan Harrod Jordan Harrod (born July 10, 1996) is an American research scientist and YouTuber who works on neuroengineering, brain-machine interfaces, and machine learning for medicine. A current graduate student at Harvard and MIT, Harrod also runs a YouT ...

to create a

deepfake Deepfakes (a portmanteau of "deep learning" and "fake") are synthetic media in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone else's likeness. While the act of creating fake content is not new, deepfakes leverage powerful ...

version of him for $100. On 1 January 2024, Scott announced that he was taking a break from his YouTube work 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.

''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 University Radio York (commonly known as URY) is a University Radio station covering the campuses of the University of York. It was the first legal independent radio station in the United Kingdom. Broadcasting from Vanbrugh College on the Univ ...

which won the

Kevin Greening Kevin Greening (30 December 1962 – 29 December 2007) was a British radio presenter, who co-hosted ''Radio 1 Breakfast'' on BBC Radio 1 with Zoe Ball from 13 October 1997 to 25 September 1998. Early career Kevin Greening grew up in Bristol whe ...

award at the

Student Radio Awards The Student Radio Association (SRA) is a representative body which supports and acts on behalf of the UK student radio community, comprising radio stations that are associated with or linked to a place of education. It is a not-for-profit organi ...

in 2008. The group has created several podcasts and video series over the years including:

''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. Scott has said he has plans to keep the podcast going beyond 2024 despite indefinitely pausing his weekly

release schedule.

Other work

In 2014, Scott co-founded

Emojli Emojli was a social application for iOS and Android, created by YouTuber and web developer Tom Scott, and YouTuber and broadcast engineer Matt Gray. Usernames could contain only emoji and users could only communicate using emoji within the ap ...

along with Matt Gray. It was a parody

emoji An emoji ( ; plural emoji or emojis) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed conversat ...

-only social network inspired by Yo. Emojli was described by ''

Salon Salon may refer to: Common meanings * Beauty salon, a venue for cosmetic treatments * French term for a drawing room, an architectural space in a home * Salon (gathering), a meeting for learning or enjoyment Arts and entertainment * Salon (P ...

'' as "an inside joke turned into reality". It closed in July 2015 after it became too expensive to maintain. In September 2015, Scott created a full-size

keyboard out of fourteen standard keyboards to type every standard Unicode emoji. Scott worked for the

Daily Mirror The ''Daily Mirror'' is a British national daily tabloid. Founded in 1903, it is owned by parent company Reach plc. From 1985 to 1987, and from 1997 to 2002, the title on its masthead was simply ''The Mirror''. It had an average daily print ...

's UsVsTh3m creating Flash games, some of which he continues to maintain on his personal website. Other web apps Scott has created include "Evil", a web app that revealed the phone numbers of Facebook users; "Tweleted", which showed posts deleted from Twitter; "What's Osama bin Watchin?", which mashed together an image of

Osama bin Laden Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden (10 March 1957 – 2 May 2011) was a Saudi-born extremist militant who founded al-Qaeda and served as its leader from 1988 until Killing of Osama bin Laden, his death in 2011. Ideologically a Pan-Islamism ...

with YouTube

Internet meme An Internet meme, commonly known simply as a meme ( ), is an idea, behavior, style, or image that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. What is considered a meme may vary across different communities on the Internet ...

s; "Parliament WikiEdits", a

Twitter bot A Twitter bot is a type of software bot that controls a Twitter account via the Twitter API. The social bot software may autonomously perform actions such as tweeting, re-tweeting, liking, following, unfollowing, or direct messaging other accounts. ...

that tweets whenever an

IP address An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as that is connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.. Updated by . An IP address serves two main functions: network interface ident ...

from the Houses of Parliament edited Wikipedia, which inspired a wave of similar accounts including CongressEdits; and "Klouchebag", a satire of the social media rankings site

Klout Klout was a website and mobile app that used social media analytics to rate its users according to online social influence via the "Klout Score", which was a numerical value between 1 and 100. In determining the user score, Klout measured the size ...

. In December 2022, Scott appeared in two episodes of '' Christmas University Challenge'' as captain of the

team. Scott founded Pad 26 Limited, a company offering content production, format development, and YouTube consultancy.

Accolades

In 2022, Scott won the

Streamy Award The YouTube Streamy Awards, also known as the Streamy Awards or Streamys, are presented annually by Dick Clark Productions and Tubefilter to recognize excellence in online video, including directing, acting, producing, and writing. The forma ...

for Learning and Education. He was nominated in the same category in 2023.

Discography

Singles

Notes

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Scott, Tom Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Alumni of the University of York Comedy YouTubers English computer programmers English-language YouTube channels English male comedians English television presenters English YouTubers Educational and science YouTubers Online edutainment People from Mansfield YouTubers from Nottinghamshire Comedians from Nottinghamshire