Introduction
Tom Scott (born 1984) is a British comedian, YouTuber and formerly the presenter of Gadget Geeks on Sky One. He lives in London and is originally from Mansfield, Nottinghamshire. He graduated from the University of York with a degree in linguistics.
Timeline
In 2004, Scott produced a website parodying the British government's emergency response procedures and included a section explaining what to do in case of a zombie apocalypse. The Cabinet Office responded by demanding the site be taken down.
In 2008, his University Radio York radio show, "The Technical Difficulties", won the Kevin Greening Award at the Student Radio Awards. More recently, The Technical Difficulties has been relaunched as a podcast, and as a series on Scott's YouTube channel.
In 2010, Scott captained the Hitchhikers in series 3 of BBC Four's Only Connect. They reached the semi-finals, but were knocked out by the Strategists.
In 2012, he was part of the Team in the Sky 1 series Gadget Geeks where he was responsible for the Software solutions.
In 2013, Scott received widespread coverage for 'Actual Facebook Graph Searches', a Tumblr site which exposes potentially embarrassing or dangerous collation of public Facebook data using Facebook's Graph Search, such as showing men in Tehran who have said that they are "interested in men", or "Single women who live nearby and are interested in men and like getting drunk".
Politics
2008 University of York
Scott was the UK organiser of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and successfully ran as "Mad Cap'n Tom" for student union president at the University of York.
2010 UK general election
In 2010, following his involvement in pirate-related humour, Scott ran for Parliament —again as "Mad Cap'n Tom"— in the Cities of London and Westminster constituency as a joke candidate. He lost a bet with a friend that the New Orleans Saints would lose the 2010 Super Bowl and said he would run for parliament if they won.
As part of his bid, he promised to scrap taxes on rum, have schools offer courses in "swordsmanship and gunnery", and put a 50% tax on downloads of Cheryl Cole MP3s. He described his chances of winning in the safe Conservative seat of Westminster as "[s]omewhere 'twixt a snowball's chance in hell an' zero." He received 84 votes, 0.2% of the total.
YouTube
Scott also has a popular YouTube channel with over 700,000 subscribers and over 114 million views. He has a regular series on Things You Might Not Know, Amazing Places and explanations of computer security issues and linguistics, among other projects.
At the end of 2015, Scott launched a collaborative YouTube channel with his colleague Matt Gray called Matt and Tom, wherein the pair regularly sit on a park bench and discuss videos on Scott's other channel, occasions from their past, travels and stories related to their jobs.
Emojli
Scott along with Matt Gray co-founded Emojli in 2014. It was an emoji-only social network based on social networking application Yo. It was described by Salon as "an inside joke turned into reality". It closed in July 2015 after it became too expensive to maintain.
Web apps
Other web-related humour Scott has created includes "Evil", a web app that revealed the phone numbers of Facebook users, "Tweleted"—which allowed you to see posts deleted from Twitter, and "What's Osama bin Watchin?", which mashes together an image of Osama bin Laden with Internet meme videos from YouTube. In 2012, Scott released 'Klouchebag', a satire of the social media rankings site Klout.