The Unsuck D.C. Metro blog and social media account began a decade ago as one of the few ways that residents could learn about delays and other issues on the WMATA rail system.

“You’d find problems on the rail faster on his account than by following Metro’s official account,” says Martin Di Caro, a former transportation reporter for WAMU, which now owns DCist. “One reason why accounts like his and other similar accounts that follow Metro, of which there are many, [have such large followings] is because for years, Metro did a poor job of communicating with the public through social media.”

The same year the blog launched in 2009, Washington Post reporter Robert McCartney interviewed the man behind it. He was described as “a bearded, 41-year-old former news reporter” who McCartney deemed was “right that Metro is too complacent about deteriorating standards.” The Post granted him anonymity, the only condition under which he would speak. Outlets from FOX 5 to the Washington Examiner to ABC News have continued the trend of referring to him by his account’s name rather than his given one.

Unsuck D.C. Metro has been a release valve for frustrated riders. They tweet at the account when trains whizz by without stopping, or don’t arrive at all, or have floors covered in mysterious liquid, and Unsuck retweets them. The blog was also at the forefront of noticing that the quality of Metro’s service had worsened, long before the transit agency acknowledged it. And the name has inspired a slew of other, apparently unaffiliated “Unsuck” accounts—Unsuck DCRA, Unsuck D.C. Schools, and Unsuck D.C. Cars, for starters—though none of them come close to rivaling the following of the original.

But over the ensuing decade, the tenor of the Unsuck D.C. Metro account changed sharply. Service updates are mixed in with hostility and public shaming. The targets of his attacks—often low-level Metro employees or the riders themselves—don’t have access to the same large social media platform.

“I will continue to post pics of people behaving badly on Metro no matter their sex or race or sexual orientation,” the man behind the account declared on Twitter last week. Someone asked him to define what he meant by “behaving badly,” noting that it “seems pretty subjective.” He responded with one word: “Tedious.”

Through all these changes, he has insisted that he should not be named publicly. He wouldn’t talk to DCist for this story (more on that later) but explained to Washingtonian last year that he didn’t want to become a public figure because “it’s kind of mean out there for public figures … I’m not really interested in that.” He followed up later to tell the magazine that “I feel that I am accountable to readers. If they think I provide something valuable, they follow me and engage. If they don’t, they can not follow me/ignore me.”

Over the years, as his follower count grew to more than 83,000 people on Twitter and 19,000 on Facebook, it’s become harder and harder to ignore him. He stopped blogging a few years back. Now his main reach is through his Twitter account. That’s where, in addition to continuing his updates regarding Metro’s service and flaws, he disseminates images of people he disapproves of to his many followers, while claiming that he ought not be public himself.

Among the aspects that remain hidden is whether the person or people behind the account have any conflicts of interest in constantly bashing Metro, its employees, or those who seek to improve the rail system rather than abolish it. Ironically, this makes it tricky for the account, which claims to be focused on accountability, to itself be held accountable.

The Unsuck Twitter feed has been highly critical of Metro’s main union and its employees. The union, in turn, says that the account’s broadcasting of workers’ photos has consequences for Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689’s approximately 9,000 current WMATA employees.

“When Unsuck D.C. Metro tweets out photos of workers they are often subject to racist and sexist comments for days,” says Barry Hobson, the chief of staff for ATU Local 689, which represents the majority of Metro employees. “The account holder is fully aware of their impact and has repeatedly been asked to consider the consequences of their actions. We’re confident that the account holder would not like strangers to take photos of them at their place of employment.”

Unsuck appeared on The Kojo Nnamdi Show in 2016 under his account name, a week after ATU Local 689 President Jackie Jeter said on the show that sites like Unsuck used racially coded connotations. He maintained that he was not racist, and had no control over the replies to his tweets. “Is the Washington Post racist because weirdos show up on their website and make racist comments?” Unsuck asked.

Unsuck D.C. Metro is also the plaintiff in a federal lawsuit against Metro filed at the end of April with the help of Judicial Watch, a conservative legal foundation. He’s suing for access to a 2018 customer survey, and over what he deems “unlawful” fees he incurred using an open records request to acquire the document. (After he appealed an outright denial from the agency for the document, Metro sent along its most recent 29-page survey with 28 pages redacted, along with a bill for nearly $325.) In the lawsuit, Unsuck D.C. Metro describes itself as an “unincorporated association … of residents of the District of Columbia, the State of Maryland, and the Commonwealth of Virginia” with a stated purpose to “raise awareness and educate DMV residents and visitors about the operations of Metro.” (Metro has declined to comment for this story, citing the ongoing litigation.)

But what the account deems as educational has been viewed by many more WMATA watchers as acrid, especially of late. By virtue of his high follower count, his proclamations are often seen as newsworthy—the lawsuit claims that his work is “followed by and has been reported on by the local news media,” even though his name is not associated with it. He calls journalists “shills” when they write stories he deems overly deferential to the transit agency. He now advocates against public funding for Metro altogether and has argued against the Council’s bill to remove criminal penalties for fare evaders.

“He’s definitely gone through a few iterations,” says Stephen Repetski, who runs the Twitter account MetroReasons, which uses data to analyze and often criticize the transit agency’s on-time performance. Repetski says he never considered going the anonymous route, which he thinks lends an account less credibility.

Repetski remembers that, at the outset, Unsuck D.C. Metro would run a blog with “stories about what was going on within the agency with actual sources—that’s definitely gone by the wayside.” While Unsuck still tweets out paragraphs of text from what he claims are Metro workers, Repetski wonders whether the text is missing nuance or context based on his own conversations with WMATA employees and transit experts. “It can definitely be deceiving,” he says.

Overall, Repetski describes the current version of Unsuck as one in which “some of the day-to-day retweets that he does give a level of credibility as far as being able to serve as information [to riders], which then gets bogged down by the other amounts of vitriol that get spewed from that account.”

A recent case: After D.C.-based author Natasha Tynes tweeted out a photo of a uniformed Metro employee eating on the train, Tynes faced a swift, harsh response that led her to delete her post. But the photo of the WMATA operator lived on—the Unsuck D.C. Metro account took a screenshot and sent it out to his tens of thousands of followers with the text “Nah,” and then pinned it to the top of his feed for greater visibility.

Amid complaints that his post lacked empathy, Unsuck D.C. Metro responded with more posts of the photo or about how pleased he was with angering legions of users. “Aha!” he wrote in a tweet that summed up his response to the criticism he was facing online for circulating the photo of the Metro employee. “So ‘woke’ means insufferable, semi-literate, race obsessed, angry, nitwit. Got it!” He lost thousands of followers over that weekend—though about 98 percent remained, per his calculations—and blocked a number of the people who questioned his handling of the situation.

“What’s telling is that you do all of this behind an anonymous account,” one person tweeted in response. “You don’t have enough courage to show your own face & name, but find it cool to share unauthorized photos of other people?”

While the account always maintained the illusion of anonymity, as far back as 2010 there was a photo posted on a public Flickr account that revealed his identity and likeness. “That’s Mr. Unsuckdcmetro, Matt Hilburn,” the caption reads, showing him at a meeting with then-Metro Interim General Manager Richard Sarles at the transit agency’s headquarters with other local bloggers. By 2018, ARLnow was describing him as the “semi-anonymous creator” of the blog for a near-hour-long interview with him on its podcast. His identity is an open secret, a quick Twitter search away for interested parties.

Hilburn’s own LinkedIn account says that he is the creator of a “very popular anonymous local news blog” that began in January 2009 (when Unsuck D.C. Metro began publishing) and, within several months, “had broken several news stories and generated mentions in all the major Washington media, including a full profile by the Washington Post.” In addition to his Unsuck work, which he says is unpaid, his LinkedIn profile lists his current employment since 2011 as an online reporter at Voice of America, a U.S.-government funded international news outlet. VOA confirmed that he is still an employee.

In a Voice of America video chat in 2015 about citizen journalism, Hilburn says that he used to run a blog and continued to run a Twitter feed and Facebook page on “our public transportation here in Washington, which is lacking in some ways, I think.”

Many journalists are reluctant to quote sources anonymously. “We start from the position that yes, we should be fully naming the people who are in our stories,” says Mark Memmott, NPR’s senior supervising editor for standards and practices. He says that, with the key news questions of who, what, when, where, and why, “‘Who’ is the first of the W’s. Part of building credibility and trust with your audience is letting them see, consistently, that you’re fully identifying the people, you’re quoting them accurately, and you’re not disguising them.”

There are exceptions to this, of course—the most obvious being if identifying a source would put someone in danger. Other examples Memmott provides for granting anonymity include chronic medical issues, substance abuse issues, and financial problems. But those are special cases.

“Our general rule is that anonymous sources can’t take cheap shots at other people,” Memmott says. “They can’t be allowed to harshly criticize without basis.”

Hilburn has long said he remains anonymous for two main reasons: He faces threats from Metro employees (he said after the Tynes controversy that he had received “vague emailed threats” that wouldn’t rise to the level of contacting law enforcement), and he doesn’t want his own identity to distract from the community he created. But by morphing into an account that at worst fuels harassment and at best enables it, the ongoing anonymity of Unsuck D.C. Metro has become more controversial.

Hilburn was, not surprisingly, unhappy when I told him that his identity was publicly available and I would not grant him anonymity in this story. He hung up on me and immediately blocked me on Twitter. Then, he posted a portion of the follow-up email I sent him on his feed and proceeded to spend the next 24 hours insulting me, DCist, and WAMU, and encouraging his followers to do the same.

It was the latest example of a more malicious and personal approach for an account once widely lauded for its public service function of bringing Metro’s missteps and malfeasance to light.