Do we like them?Do we like Stevin John?
Our score: 6 out of 10. No harmful words or company found and one old stunt he regrets, but too little solid reporting to score him higher.
Stevin John is the bloke who made Blippi, the bright orange-and-blue kids' character who turned a YouTube channel into a global preschool staple. He started the channel in 2014 and played the character himself for years. A 2018 New Zealand interview described him as funny, kind and engaging in person.
The one real stain is from before Blippi. In 2013 he made a viral Harlem Shake video under an earlier persona, showing him defecating on a nude friend, according to VICE's reporting. It resurfaced in early 2019 once he was a kids' star, and his lawyer sent BuzzFeed News a cease-and-desist letter claiming copyright on the video.
His side of it: he told Motherboard he had been filing takedown requests for years, wherever he found the clip, and that it wasn't a reaction to the press. He disputed that this was going to extreme lengths, and called the old stunt embarrassing. Where you land depends on whether you read the takedowns as damage control or as a bloke tidying up a stupid youthful mistake.
On the harm check, we found nothing. No searches turned up him campaigning on or speaking about trans or LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, vaccines or the climate, and no reporting of him platforming people who do. That's partly a thin record: most of what's online about him is content-farm filler, which we ignored. Those sites also push rumours of lawsuits and arrests, and we found nothing reliable behind them.
He stepped back from the on-screen role in 2021, with Clayton Grimm, already the live-tour Blippi, taking over the main YouTube show. Distractify reports he wasn't fired and didn't quit, and that he stays involved behind the scenes. Fans were unhappy at first, but the transition seems to have gone without a stoush.
On the good stuff, we couldn't verify any named charity or donation, so we won't invent one. What he's got is a children's brand built on counting, colours and curiosity, and nothing nasty attached to his own name since. Lean yes, with the asterisk being that old video and how little hard reporting there is.