Behind the scenes, however, Beiruti is in regular contact with the Internal Security Forces (ISF), Lebanon’s main police force, which has followed up on some of the leads he has posted to the Facebook page. Beiruti said his investigations have helped the ISF with hundreds of cases over the years, but that the ISF only arrests a fraction of the suspects he identifies. (The ISF said the page helped with “many” cases but declined to supply a specific number.) Beiruti said he speaks to the ISF about once a week, usually when it has a complaint with one of his posts. Otherwise, he said, the authorities don’t want anything to do with him. “I think sometimes that they don't want me to exist,” he said. “They wish that my page is closed. And I feel that I may be considered an embarrassment to them, because I solve crimes that [they can't].”

Joseph Moussallem, an ISF spokesperson, said the force treats information from the page just like a lead from any other media source, and that it conducts independent investigations to confirm the tips. He said that the ISF is not allowed to go about its work the way Beiruti does—posting photos and videos of suspects, crowdsourcing an investigation, and publishing the results, all without a warrant or official permission—but that it has been helped by the page’s results. He characterized the ISF’s cooperation with Beiruti as limited, saying the force generally reaches out to him only to correct misinformation and false accusations against its officers.

Beiruti told me that he’s a Lebanese man in his 40s who runs the page in addition to—and often during—his day job as an office worker. Beiruti said he started the first version of Weynieh el Dawleh in 2013 in an effort to fill gaps he perceived in local reporting. He claimed to have only begun publicly identifying suspected criminals about two years later, when he said his followers began sending in videos and photos.

(These claims are difficult to confirm: Facebook has taken down older versions of Beiruti’s pages. And while I could not confirm the details on his personal background, which he said he guards to protect himself from retaliation, I am convinced that he is the page’s administrator. Over the course of several months, we corresponded via the phone number included on nearly every post on the Facebook page; when I asked Beiruti over the phone to prove he was also in control of the page, he quickly sent me a Facebook message from Weynieh el Dawleh with a specific phrase I asked him to include, and shared a screenshot of the page’s administration panel. He also gave me the name of his contact at the ISF, who confirmed that he had spoken with the page’s administrator.)

Legal and digital-rights advocates told me that they began having concerns with the page over the past year. They said that the administrator could conceivably misidentify suspects, and that those doxxed on the page could be vulnerable to vigilante violence. Beiruti said he’s only misidentified a suspect once, and that no one he has outed has ever suffered violent retribution. It's unclear how he would be able to make either claim.