Do we like Zoe Sugg?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Decent record and real charity work, held back by old posts mocking gay and trans people that she apologised for.
Zoella is the original bedroom-blogger-turned-empire. Zoe Sugg started out on YouTube and her blog in 2009, then built a beauty and homeware range and wrote the novel Girl Online, which sold 78,000 copies in its first week, a record for a debut author.
The first big stoush came in 2014, when it emerged she had help writing that novel. Penguin said she didn't write it alone, plenty of fans felt misled, and she went offline for a bit. She later called the backlash “terrifying” and wrote the sequel herself with an editor. That's a business-practice fumble, not a character flaw.
The harm check is where it gets sticky. In 2017 PinkNews dug up old posts: a 2010 tweet she wrote about gay men and a 2011 post to a fellow YouTuber using a slur for trans women. She said she was “sorry if I have offended anyone” and that it was not who she is today. She also tweeted in 2011 “Gay, straight, female, male, transgender, alien…who cares!” so it's a mixed old record.
What we didn't find matters too. No campaigning against LGBTQ+ or trans people, no vaccine or climate nonsense, no culture-war grifting, and no search turned up a slide into grievance. Our search also turned up no sign of recent work with people who push harm. That's why it's an asterisk rather than a fail.
On the business side, the UK ad regulator ruled in April 2020 that an ASOS affiliate-link Instagram story she posted wasn't clearly labelled as an ad, holding her and ASOS jointly responsible. It's a rule-following slip rather than anything nasty, and the only regulatory outcome we found.
The good stuff is real. In 2014 she became a digital ambassador for the mental health charity Mind and fronted its #DontPanicButton campaign. Using a platform that big to lift a cause beats a lot of influencers who only sell the lipgloss.