In Sheffield city centre, a man is stumbling around near a bus stop, apparently in a drug induced stupor.

For YouTuber Curtis Arnold, AKA DJE Media, the man’s vulnerable state is an invitation to film. “This guy is completely gone … let’s get a bit closer to get some of this audio,” Arnold says, moving towards him.

Arnold speculates – with little evidence – about the man and his companion. “[They] definitely look a little bit like drug takers, but the trouble kind of drug takers. The kind who will shoplift every day to feed it [a drug habit]. I could be wrong, obviously, but he’s definitely gone, this guy.

“It’s not even funny, he’s in another world, this man here. I’ll probably get a face shot and we’ll be out of here. Flipping hell – has he taken something? I can’t actually tell.”

Curtis tries to engage the man in conversation, but he’s slurring his words and can barely form a sentence. He’s clearly unable to consent to being on camera – but that’s no problem for this car-crash style of documentary.

This is the world of “auditing”, a new kind of content found on YouTube. If you head down to your local high street or to a political protest, you’re likely to be caught in the shots of one of these prolific filmmakers.

Auditors – so-called because they play at being citizen-journalists, “auditing” what they see around them – post hours-long videos of their walks around Britain’s urban landscapes. They are basically wind-up merchants, antagonising people and using their reactions as evidence that Britain is “finished”, hoping to get clicks and advertising revenue.

The problems of UK high streets – boarded-up shops, anti-social behaviour, a lack of support for vulnerable people – are real. But seen through the eyes of these YouTubers, Britain looks apocalyptic.

Typical video titles on DJE Media reference “warzones” populated by “3rd world sinister demons”, “crackies” (people struggling with addictions), “migrant drug dealers” and “feral females”. These videos are peppered with footage of drunken brawls, violent arrests and encounters with people living difficult lives on the streets – and have racked up hundreds of thousands of views.

Manchester’s Piccadilly Gardens – nicknamed Crackadilly Gardens because of its problems with people abusing drugs – has become a magnet for auditors. Mayor Andy Burnham has criticised them as “agent provocateurs”.

Another common target is hotels housing asylum seekers. Auditors enter the grounds of hotels and wind up staff and security guards, no doubt emboldened by mainstream political discourse which agrees that migration is a criminal conspiracy. Political protests are also perfect street theatre: antiracists and pro-Palestine protesters are portrayed as unwashed lefties or violent “antifa” instigators, while far-right protesters are given softball interviews.

The auditors insist they show Britain as it really is, gritty and unvarnished. One could argue they hold up a mirror to wider media: tabloids have been heralding the decline of civilisation as we know it since forever. But as antagonists rather than observers, this is a state of affairs auditors themselves create. In fact, they embody a cartoonish distortion of journalism’s worst excesses, filtered through algorithmic imperatives for sensation and doom. Here are some of the key players on this weird, depressing scene.

Curtis Arnold, AKA DJE Media at an anti-racist demonstration in London. Image: DJE Media on Youtube

DJE MEDIA.

One of the most prominent auditors is DJE Media, real name Curtis Arnold. He’s a barber and bodybuilder from Worcestershire, and has around 250,000 YouTube subscribers.

His channel claims to be “showing the GOOD, BAD & UGLY of society.” But Arnold has an ugly past of his own.

Arnold has a string of convictions, including for perverting the course of justice, burglary, and drunk driving.

In 2018 he was convicted of fraud after he visited gyms and tricked women into modelling leggings, taking sexualised photos and posting them on social media without the women’s permission.

In 2023 he told the Sun: “I’ve had my punishment,” and said “it wasn’t young women” he was taking photos of in gyms.

Arnold also gained negative press after he tricked his way past the police to film the body of Nicola Bulley, a woman who drowned in the River Wyre in Lancashire in 2023. Arnold posted the footage as “Nicola Bulley Breaking Police found something !!!” and made almost £1,000 in revenue from Tiktok and YouTube for the footage. He was arrested on suspicion of malicious communication offences and on suspicion of stalking Bulley’s neighbours, but no charges were brought.

At the time, Arnold told reporters he recognised the impact his content could have had on the family. “If they saw it, it can’t have been a nice thing for them to have seen and I’m sorry about that”, he said.

“My ambition is to be a full-time YouTuber and make a good living from it. The income potential is there and I love doing what I am doing on the channel.”

In September, he attended Tommy Robinson’s “festival of free speech” in central London, but spent most of the time filming anti-racist counter-protesters. He later explained to his audience: “I thought, if we go in their side for a bit, chances are we’re gonna see something, they’re going to kick off, they’re going to behave badly and I’ll film it. So that’s why I was in the left side. Not because I’m a fucking lefty … I wanted to film their drama, I wanted to show them up.”

Charlie Veitch. Image: Charlie Veitch on Youtube

Charlie Veitch.

In one of the earliest videos of Charlie Veitch on the internet, the YouTuber makes an impassioned speech through a megaphone against Israel’s 2008-9 attack on Gaza.

“They’ve been butchered in the Gaza strip using British and American machinery in the hands of Israeli soldiers,” he said, decrying “the heavy boot of colonialism and economic imperialism”, “our war of occupation” in Iraq and “the English speaking man’s imperialism around the world”.

He’s been on quite a journey since then. Veitch, who has 820,000 YouTube subscribers, today calls himself a Zionist and spends his time trolling leftwing protesters for clicks.

In a video about a Ukip rally in Liverpool in August as part of its “mass deportations tour”, Veitch called the party’s leader Nick Tenconi “charismatic” while criticising “the Orks, the trolls, the genetically dis-genic … scummy, antifa-commies who cannot stand the idea of English people celebrating England”.

In a way, Veitch is an auditing pioneer, annoying people in order to make online videos for decades. Veitch worked as a financial advisor in the City of London for seven years before getting fired in 2009. Rather than find a new job, he founded the Love Police, an anarchic, absurdist video project which often involved him trying to get a rise out of authority figures such as police officers and security guards.

He then became a prominent name among conspiracy theorists as a 9/11 truther. In 2013, he announced he no longer believed 9/11 was an inside job – a volte face which made him hated in the conspiracy theory movement.

In 2011, Veitch was arrested on suspicion of “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance” ahead of the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

Stylistically, his videos have more in common with internet trolling than journalism, and sometimes involve him wandering around towns making bizarre observations about street furniture, architecture and whatever else he comes across.

He goads teenagers and titles the video “INTIMIDATED, SURROUNDED for being white in a Muslim area”. He remonstrates with school security guards asking him not to film when children are in the background of his shot. He films people who appear to be struggling with addiction and calls them crackheads.

His antics have got him noticed in Manchester, where he lives. Sarah Lester, editor of the Manchester Evening News (MEN), called Veitch’s content a “human form of bear-baiting”. Veitch hit back at this in a video in which he described the MEN’s coverage of his activities as a “hit piece”, saying, “I’ve never said I’m a journalist”.

It’s never clear how sincere Veitch is. However, his videos often have political messages that seem to be taken seriously by YouTube commenters – and he has taken a dramatic rightward turn in recent years.

In a video from the summer entitled “KEEP THE PRESSURE ON THE MIGRANT HOTELS”, Veitch stands outside migrant accommodation in Lancashire which he describes as “an illegal military barracks for invading Islamist forces”. He says: “May the legal and peaceful protests continue,” before adding, with a wry expression, “as a public figure, as a YouTuber, that’s all I’m able to recommend – is legal, peaceful things”.

Wesley Winter appears in a video at a far-right demonstration in Southampton. Image: Wesley Winter on Youtube

Wesley Winter.

Wesley Winter used to make videos about his travels in China. When he returned to the UK in July 2024, he made a video about a Tommy Robinson march, which went viral.

Two days later, Axel Rudakubana murdered three children in Southport. Winter threw himself into filming the rioting that followed, criticising the so-called “two-tier policing” he saw at a protest in London.

A few days later in Middlesbrough, Winter – born to British and Korean parents – found himself in the middle of a racist pogrom. He was stopped by rioters because of his ethnicity. His “heart sank”, he told the Times. “It changed the tone for me. I was thinking: am I next?”

His wife, Cailin Liu, who was waiting in a car in a nearby car park, was surrounded by 30 teenagers in balaclavas, who torched the car next to hers. They circled her car before a police helicopter was heard overhead and they scattered.

When Winter reached the car park, he found Liu sobbing and shaking. The dramatic scene was featured in the Channel 4 documentary, One Day in Southport. Director Dan Reed said Winter’s story was included as “a bit of a morality tale”. “You start out where there’s the acceptable face of white working-class discontent and you end up somewhere really quite scary,” he said.

It’s unclear that Winter has reflected on this. “You’re always going to get extreme people coming to different events and I don’t think you can stop that,” he said. “But the reason why my videos have done so well is that you can’t ignore these issues.”

Winter told the BBC’s The Media Show, “I don’t have a political stance whenever I do my videos, I wouldn’t say I’m an activist at all,” adding, “Many people call it citizen journalism which I wasn’t really aware of … I just say, ‘I make videos on YouTube, do you want to chat to me?’. Explaining the success of his videos to the Times, he said: “I keep it raw and open and just let people talk.”

But his videos bear the hallmarks of the “auditing” style, with apocalyptic headlines and skewed reporting.

In a recent video from protests outside of the Aston Villa vs Maccabi Tel Aviv Europa League match, from which fans of the Israeli club were banned from attending, Winter tries to get a woman standing impassively and holding an anti-racist placard to speak to him. Without introducing himself or even saying hello, he opens with: “You’re very aggressive. Do you want to say something? How much did you get paid to come here? Took the train from London?” He later tells viewers it is only “deranged” “lefty women” who don’t wish to speak to him.

Winter’s warped lens appears to have reached parliament. In September, as protests against hotels housing asylum seekers spread, Reform MP Lee Anderson told the Express there is an institutional problem with the policing of far-right demonstrations, saying: “We’ve seen it on a march a few days ago, one of the police officers says, ‘If you see any fascists let me know’. Fascists? I’d say some of the police officers adopting these techniques, they’re more like the fascists of years gone by.”

He was presumably referring to footage from Winter, who filmed a police officer at a protest in Epping, Essex, saying “flashes” – as in flash-points – and misheard it as “fascists”. This piece of “two-tier policing” disinformation was seen by almost a million viewers on X/Twitter, Anderson seemingly among them.

ST Audits.

ST Audits, real name Christopher Lee Matthews, is a former wrestler and doorman from Stoke-on-Trent.

He calls himself a “citizen-journalist” but has largely dispensed with any pretence at journalism. He has over 6,000 subscribers and makes his views clear with video titles like “PROUD WELSH PATRIOTS Versus Unwashed Lefties in Mold Flintshire”.

Matthews is another YouTuber to rock up at hotels housing asylum seekers with the aim of winding up staff and causing confrontation for clicks, along with his friend Joe Gough, AKA Joe Vloggs. According to anti-extremist research group Hope Not Hate, which has produced a report on auditors, Matthews has “one of the most confrontational and belligerent approaches that we have come across”.

In the description of a number of his videos are the words “Fritzl’s basement”, which appears to be a reference to Joseph Fritzl, the Austrian criminal who kept his daughter captive for 24 years and fathered seven children with her.

According to Hope Not Hate, Matthews is a former doorman from the Stoke-on-Trent and Newcastle-under-Lyme bar and nightclub scene who kept weapons with him on shift.

From 1991, Matthews had a 25 year career as a professional wrestler nick-named “The Crippler”.

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