If you follow Canadian politics on Twitter, chances are you’ve met Min Reyes, at least virtually.

Not just because she has racked up an astonishing 102,000 Tweets in only 18 months — after all, anybody can tweet a million banalities — but because, by every metric, she has clout and influence in the Canadian political conversation.

So much so that the charitable organization Samara Canada, which aims to get more citizens engaged in the political process, announced two weeks ago that Reyes ranked as the most mentioned tweeter in #cdnpoli.

It’s in #cdnpoli where you’ll find the political and media heavy hitters: @pmharper, @elizabethmay, @bobraemp, @susandelacourt, @peggynashndp, @oliviachow, @chantalhebert as well as news organizations such as @torontostar.

You’d think they would be the ones most often talked about and whose tweets get the most traction.

But @Min_Reyes, a stay-at-home blogger who will only reveal that she is in her early 30s, tops them all.

“I’m on Twitter all frickin day,” she says on the phone from Richmond, B.C., where she and three dozen others have been protesting the Harper government’s omnibus budget bill in front of Conservative MP Alice Wong’s riding office.

Reyes, who is also active on Facebook, considers herself fortunate that her domestic situation gives her the freedom to be a full-time activist.

Still, it wasn’t easy.

After leaving home at 17, she worked her way through Simon Fraser University, winning scholarships before earning a BA in communication and rhetoric. After that, she became a graphic artist. Two years ago, she returned to school to study journalism. But she quickly became disappointed with the program, which she deemed too focused on form over substance.

After she blogged about that disillusionment, she quit school and travelled to Toronto, where she connected with other activists.

How did this young woman of Korean parentage, who grew up in Paraguay, arrived in Canada in 1998 not speaking any English, and now lives in New Westminster, B.C., get so deep into Canadian politics when, as she admits, she was unengaged and uninformed just a few years ago?

“Funny thing, in 2008 I voted Conservative,” Reyes says. “I didn’t care about politics. I cared about landing a good job in communication. Basically 2008 came and I didn’t know who to vote for. So I watched the leaders’ debate.”

To Reyes, the debate was pure chaos — except for Harper, who kept his cool.

“Harper was always composed,” she recalls. “All these other people were ganging up on him but he seemed to always have the right answers. So 2008 I ended up voting for the Conservative MP in my riding, thinking that Conservatives were the only ones who knew what they were doing and they’re not always yelling.”

Then, two years later, she discovered Question Period on CPAC.

“I’d never heard of it before; it looked kind of interesting,” she explains. “That day Jack Layton was asking Harper about tax cuts and subsidies not creating jobs and Harper didn’t answer the question. He was full of rhetoric. Again, Jack Layton asked the question. Harper didn’t answer.

“Now I have a background in communication and I know what rhetoric is. That’s when I realized, OK, I voted for that guy and now I am responsible for showing others that they can’t fall for this. That’s when I started following politics pretty closely. That was a wake-up call. That’s how I got engaged.”

Reyes plunge into politics was fast and deep.

“My tweeting wasn’t always Canadian-related,” she says. “When I first started, it was all about the Egyptian revolution. And then it was about the Spanish revolution. And, when the Canadian elections happened, that’s when I started getting Canadian followers and I started following Canadian tweeters.”

And they started following her. At last count, she was almost at 6,500, far more than many political pundits and other news personalities.

By last fall, she was so active on Twitter she was organizing Occupy Vancouver, while fending off media demands for personal profiles.

Which is when Samara Canada began its study. Its list of top #cdnpoli tweeters is part of a much larger report — Occupiers and Legislators: A Snapshot of Political Media Coverage — to be released next week.

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But the study could be flawed by the simple fact that many prominent political tweeters, whose followers outnumber those who track @Min_Reyes, never use hashtags. (Journalists are notoriously bad at this.)

“Yes, there are a lot of political conversations that happen away from #cdnpoli,” agrees Samara researcher Wayne Chu. “But the perspective that we took with this is, if you are going on to Twitter for political conversation, where would you go? #cdnpoli is one, if not the major, political hashtag out there.”

Samara’s “Neighbourhoods of #cdnpoli” breaks down the 22,000 unique #cdnpoli tweeters into four categories:

• “The Ottawa Bubble,” mostly political insiders, is off to one side, largely insular and not engaged with anybody outside the group.

• “The Information Broadcasters” tend to envelope mainstream news sources, which tweet out links to their own stories but don’t interact with followers.

• “The Lightning Rods” are an eclectic mix mostly made up of politicians and pundits who are mentioned by other groups and are very engaged with other tweeters.

• “The Outsiders” who are mostly left-leaning bloggers and alternate media such as Rabble.ca.

This last group is where @Min_Reyes falls.

“My focus has shifted from relaying already existing news to creating news based on the research that we and our collaborators do,” she says. “I spend a lot of time mapping connections to high-profile corporations and their boards of directors and how they’re linked to either politicians or political parties or lobbies, for instance. I just find that’s something the media don’t bring out. It’s important to connect who really influences politics.”

Strangely, she suddenly disappeared from #cdnpoli last month, not because she stopped tweeting the hashtag but because Twitter, for some unexplained reason, dropped her tweets that contained it.

Repeated emails to Twitter resulted in repeated references to Twitter support pages — but no explanations or fixes. Spokesperson Rachel Horwitz cited “privacy reasons” for not discussing Reyes’ case.

“I wouldn’t like to call it a conspiracy, but a technical issue that goes on for so long needs an answer,” insists Reyes.

Still, she remains undeterred. She keeps on tweeting, blogging, organizing and demonstrating, despite how depressing she finds the current political situation, here and around the world.

“It’s about keeping hope and the fire alive,” she says. “Sometimes I feel, OK, I just want to shoot myself right now. I’m not gonna get on Twitter. I’m not gonna care. It’s just too terrible.

“But it’s addictive. It’s a kind of drug.”

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