Kensington Beach’s Instagram account owner spoke at the RNC. Some community members say his posts exploit the community.

Part-time Kensington resident Michael Coyle has been posting for years pictures and videos of addicted people on the streets in the neighborhood, showing scenes of despair from the East Coast’s largest open-air drug market.

Coyle’s various Instagram accounts, all variations of the handle “Kensington Beach,” propelled him onto the stage at the Republican National Convention on Tuesday night. There, the registered Republican — who says he has never voted — pledged to support former President Donald Trump. Calling Philadelphia’s Kensington section “one of the worst neighborhoods in America,” Coyle held up his hometown as evidence that the nation needs Trump’s leadership back in the White House.

In his Kensington Beach posts, Coyle does not censor drug users’ faces and shows people injecting drugs and fighting in the street. Many are lying prone on the sidewalk, which he calls reminiscent of beachgoers lounging at the Jersey Shore, the inspiration behind the social media accounts’ name. Sometimes, he posts graphic photos of wounds caused by the animal tranquilizer xylazine, known as “tranq” on the street, where it has contaminated nearly all of the illicit opioids sold in Philadelphia.

The largest “Kensington Beach” page has more than 36,000 followers, but previous iterations — the account has been removed from Instagram multiple times — had as many as 120,000 followers.

Coyle says that his goal is simply to raise awareness of one of the worst drug crises in the country and its impact on neighbors living in Kensington. He once struggled with an addiction himself, to codeine and the sedative promethazine. A DUI in 2014 was “a wake-up call,” he said. “It helps, because I can understand somewhat. I never did heroin, I never did hard-core drugs, but at the same time I can relate.”

But others in the community say Coyle’s posts do nothing beyond inviting the internet masses to gawk at people at the worst moments of their lives, and often without their consent.

Directly across the street from the warehouse that Coyle’s family owned for decades is the New Kensington Community Development Corporation, a local community development nonprofit. Bill McKinney, its executive director, calls Coyle’s page — and dozens of other accounts like it on Instagram and YouTube — a sign of the exploitation the neighborhood has long faced.

“Instagram, YouTube, The Inquirer — the reality is, stories on Kensington sell,” said McKinney, who regularly gets requests from social media accounts from as far away as Australia, offering him $20 to walk down Kensington Avenue filming for an hour. “People want to see it. Everyone’s getting paid off this place.”

Coyle says he does not make any money off the Instagram accounts and at most had made a few hundred dollars off a donation link that he has stopped advertising.

Onstage Tuesday night, he said he also runs a nonprofit. The organization was called Kensington Beach, Coyle told The Inquirer after his speech, with its mission was aimed at “strengthening the family unit” and educating local children on careers in the trades.

The Inquirer could find no nonprofit by that name registered with the Internal Revenue Service; Coyle said the organization draws no income and that he plans to soon register it as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with the IRS.

Coyle says he grew up in Southwest Philadelphia and lived in Kensington for about six years. (He is currently splitting his time between Kensington and a construction job in Texas.) Several years ago, he felt compelled to begin to document the conditions he saw walking his dog through the neighborhood.

Coyle said he’d noticed more and more drug users on the streets since media reports publicized a Kensington train gulch where people in addiction gathered. This included Mehmet Oz, the former television personality and Republican U.S. Senate candidate, who visited the gulch for his TV show in 2017.

Afterward, the city cleared the site. Many Kensington neighbors then began to notice more people openly injecting on Kensington Avenue and residential blocks.

“We would deal with feces, dead bodies, needles,” he said. “I would walk my dog every day, around the neighborhood, and it was getting so bad. I thought, The world needs to see this. This is not normal.”

Coyle has never voted, he says, but became drawn to Republican politics after he met with a prominent conservative activist visiting Kensington. A representative from the RNC later called him to ask about potentially speaking at the convention. Coyle said he had to be interviewed as part of a vetting process before being added to Tuesday’s slate of speakers.

“Philadelphia, it’s been a Democratic-run city for so long,” he said. “Nothing’s changed — it’s gotten worse over the years. In my opinion, it can’t get any worse. Trump’s not a typical politician.

“I just hope what I did will bring more opportunity for the neighborhood.”

Coyle’s accounts are among dozens that have brought global visibility to the scene in Kensington.

A 24-hour YouTube livestream of the corner of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, where many people in addiction congregate, was raking in ad revenue from thousands of viewers and a robust live chat where people could pay up to $500 to highlight their comments, 404, a tech culture website, reported last year.

“While [commenters] sometimes talk about the bigger societal issues that created the problems they see, they mostly make fun of the situation, and the real people on camera, commenting on it as if it were a reality show,” 404 reported.

Coyle’s work falsely portrayed a difficult moment years ago for the family of Rosalind Pichardo, who runs the Sunshine House, an outreach center for people with addiction on Kensington Avenue. Coyle had posted a photo of her cousin, then in active addiction, slumped over on the street, she said.

The caption read “Rest in Peace.” The family panicked.

“He looked like he was dead. It was, like, 10 p.m., and I’m running to Temple [University Hospital] and going to the morgue, and they don’t know what I’m talking about,” Pichardo said.

The next day, she ran into her cousin — alive — on Kensington Avenue.

Pichardo is not opposed to sharing content about the situation in Kensington; she and her cousin used to film themselves chatting on park benches about the addiction crisis in their neighborhood. But she wants such material to be produced responsibly.

“We see the same things,” she said. “We see people lying dead on these streets. But to exploit them, with music in the background and flashing lights, as if this is a horror movie — it’s not OK to do.

“I don’t want [a family] to see their son laid on Kensington Avenue in a state he didn’t give consent to film.”

Behind the scenes of his social media posts, Coyle says that he does outreach to people with addiction. He carries the opioid overdose-reversing drug naloxone wherever he goes, he says, and has himself treated “probably hundreds” of overdoses. He also says he has paid thousands to send people to rehab or on flights home and has reunited families with loved ones on the street in Kensington.

But Coyle said he prefers not to publicize this engagement, even though it might offset some criticisms, because he does not want that kind of attention.

“I’m in the streets, I’m not one to get behind the podiums,” he said. “Even what I just did was very much something new for me. I never spoke in front of a crowd at all. I’m not looking to gloat for the things I do good. I’m just doing God’s work.”

Inquirer news researcher Ryan W. Briggs contributed to this article.