Do we like them?

Do we like Tom Scott?

Our score: 7 out of 10. Nothing harmful or dodgy turned up in the sources we read, but the record on LGBTQ+ and climate topics is thin, so we've held back from a higher score.

Tom Scott's whole career started as a cheeky prank. In 2004 he built a parody of the government's emergency preparedness website, the Cabinet Office demanded it come down, and he politely declined. He started his YouTube channel in 2006, and it now has well over six million subscribers.

The Facebook stunts are the nearest he gets to trouble. In 2013 he made a Graph Search site that collected public Facebook data to show how exposed people were, and the Guardian covered the privacy row around it. It was a point-making stunt rather than a scandal, and that's honestly the only stoush on the list.

For a decade he kept a promise of a new video every week. On 1 January 2024 he announced it was time to stop, calling it an extended sabbatical that he would likely come back from. He didn't respond to Yahoo News when it asked for comment, and no scandal sat behind the break, just a bloke stepping off the treadmill.

Nothing new on him lately in the controversy department. His news is the comeback: after two years he returned in March 2026 with Tom Scott: England, a road-trip series with an episode for each historic county. Episodes land on the subscription platform Nebula first and reach YouTube a week later, and he says weekly episodes should run for the rest of the year.

On the harm check, we searched for anything he has said or done against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, public health or the planet, and found nothing. No conspiracy slide, no culture-war grifting, no grievance act. The honest caveat is that he mostly makes explainer and travel videos, so he rarely says much on these topics at all, and a clean search is not the same as a loud ally.

The good stuff is mainly that he makes things for curious people. He won the Learning and Education category at the 2022 Streamy Awards, and he keeps putting his series on YouTube free, just a week after it goes to subscribers. We found no charity drives or big public stands, so we've marked him as a decent bloke rather than a hero.