N. was having a snack with some friends in a cafe when his phone started exploding with notifications.
As an experiment, he had programmed a small project, a robot that would count each time President Javier Milei liked a post on platform X, still known as Twitter, his favorite social network and the one he consumes the most. .
He was curious to answer two initial questions:
how much time the president spent there and what things he 'liked'
.
Because of how he went viral, he realized that he wasn't the only one interested in the answers to those riddles.
"How many tweets did our President like?", developed by N., is a website that monitors the president's activity in real time on the @JMilei account.
There is no community manager, specialists in political communication or anything similar: in several interviews the head of state confirmed that his Twitter account is not managed by anyone except him, a way of maintaining direct dialogue with his audience without depending on intermediaries.
According to the data collected,
in the last week he averaged about 2 hours and 51 minutes a day
on the social network.
Every day he makes a hundred RTs (retweets) and likes more than 200 messages.
In the midst of the reforms that Mileism is trying to carry out, what the President does on his Twitter account could be a minor issue except for the very strong tenor of the posts he shares and, above all, those he likes ".
From there he got into a strong fight against Lali Espósito, treated the deputies who rejected the Omnibus Law as traitors, targeted the governors and
liked a publication in which the governor of Chubut, Ignacio Torres, appeared characterized with traits of the Down's Syndrome.
Milei's likes and rts on X.
"It's an idea that floated in my head, I mentioned it to a friend and she told me it was a 'Re yes,'" N. tells
Clarín
.
He is
18 years old and just finished high school
, but he has been a programmer for a long time.
"I had the luck and the problem of being glued to the PC since I was a child," says N.
He prefers, however,
not to provide his real name to do the interview
.
Attacks from different satellite Twitter accounts (some of them operating from the Casa Rosada Women's Hall) against those who disagree with the President are common, as Lali or Torres himself experienced in recent weeks.
On Twitter his account is @esoesnulo.
The development of the bot, in JavaScript language and open source on GitHub, took just a weekend.
He started it on a Friday and by Saturday he already had the model.
He launched it on February 10.
"The idea of the bot came from the fact that there was already a lot of talk about the President's use of Twitter. Without measuring it, it seemed high and the interactions he had were strong. The bot works
by scraping
the page with random accounts," he explains.
This analysis is done every one to five minutes and generates new income every time a like appears on Milei's account.
Javier Milei's reposts when he was fighting with Lali Espósito.
Since Twitter does not provide precise information on what time Milei likes, the robot constantly checks to see if new tweets appear that the President likes.
With this she puts together the graphs, in which you can see the peaks of activity, which are usually repeated day by day.
They are usually after dawn, like last Tuesday, where she shared 31 between 1 and 2 in the morning.
At 8 she was already logged into her account again.
The algorithm that N. put together tries to calculate
the sessions
.
That is, the times Milei grabs her cell phone to check her favorite social network.
Each session is measured in minutes, not by number of likes.
"Join groups of likes up to 3 minutes apart. 15 likes in 3 minutes is 3 minutes, I'm not saying it's one minute per like. As when entering Twitter it takes you one tap to read before starting to fave, the same as when close, I add a minute at the beginning and another at the end to estimate the sessions," the author emphasizes.
For N., making this point clear is essential.
This sum is what ends up showing the time Milei spends
scrolling
through tweets that interest her.
The findings of the robot that monitors Milei: why the discriminatory tweet was real and the like of a porn actress was not
The robot started working less than three weeks ago
and became a viral topic almost at the same time as the fight with Lali Espósito.
Since then, different media began to feed on the information that the tool was providing and it became a topic of conversation on social networks.
This earned him some criticism from tweeters aligned with the government.
Several accounts of Milei's favorites tweeted about the site.
"These guys, since they didn't find ANYTHING WRONG with Milei, they pay a guy to start counting the likes that Milei gave on Twitter. They clearly DON'T SEE HER," wrote @TommyShelby_30, the second most liked user by the president.
Since these guys didn't find ANYTHING WRONG with Milei, they pay a guy to start counting the likes that Milei gave on Twitter.
They clearly DON'T SEE IT.
pic.twitter.com/6w2IomJ2nb
— Milei SheIby (@TommyShelby_30) February 17, 2024
The most popular is the influencer and architect Ornella Panizza, known as @Ladymarketok.
"They measure Milei's time on Twitter, for this they make notes, yes, about trafficking in Chaco cri cri. The important thing is always in the country," she chicaned.
The bot that N. developed is also generating a database of the posts that the President likes.
It was that tool that allowed him to confirm that Milei did indeed like a discriminatory post from the @LiberalDeMilei account, which sought to mock the Patagonian president by portraying him in an image with the features of a person with Down syndrome.
The thing is that on Wednesday his spokesperson, Manuel Adorni, denied that the like existed.
"We regret everything that happened and of course he was not a participant in such an aberration," Adorni said in his usual press conference when asked about that publication.
"I understand that it did not happen and we feel so hurt,
because I dedicated myself to analyzing the thing a little, that publication disappeared later," said the spokesperson.
Javier Milei's "like" to a discriminatory post on social networks against the governor of Chubut, Ignacio Torres.
As confirmed by N.,
the Like record does appear in its database.
The account from which it came, on the other hand, became private first and changed its name later;
Due to these changes, the controversial tweet no longer appears on the President's "Like" list.
With that same information, on the other hand, this week he came out to deny the false version that Milei had liked some posts about porn actresses, such as Mia Khalifa.
For N., the information provided by the Bot can be used to generate more data in the medium term on a topic that, he considers, is relevant.
"You can still do more analysis of the Twitter data, which ones are the most liked, and if they are also part of the team that has now been hired," he says about the digital communication staff that Juan Pablo Carreira has led since last week, more known in X as Juan Doe.
❌this like is fake❌
just like the supposed like of Mia Khalifa from a few days ago https://t.co/qKcdiZkdw7
— Nulo (@esoesnulo) February 29, 2024
Although he clarifies that "he is a programmer and not a political analyst," N. says that he was shocked by the time Milei spends on networks.
"Beyond that, I think the strongest thing is the so-called
Yrigoyen algorithm
. It is clear from the amount of time he spends on networks, added to the fact that he has a very economic perception of the world that does not register the social as much. And that is reflected see on his Twitter," evaluates presidential media consumption.
"Many people who spend too much time on social networks have their eyes crossed by that, but the novelty of this case is that it is a president," closes N., the young man who created the only system that can follow Milei's frenetic tweeting pulse: a robot.