Using the master archive of social media outlinks found in worldwide news coverage monitored by GDELT 2016-2019, a single SQL query was all it took in BigQuery to compile a ranked list of the 1,742,760 distinct Twitter accounts whose posts were linked to by news coverage over that time period. The list contains a mixture of politicians, celebrities, businesspersons and social-friendly news outlets.
The full list can be downloaded:
Here is a preview of the top 15 entries:
| Row | Twitter User | Citations |
| 1 | https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump | 1,120,594 |
| 2 | https://twitter.com/ani | 95,366 |
| 3 | https://twitter.com/kensingtonroyal | 49,193 |
| 4 | https://twitter.com/elonmusk | 46,941 |
| 5 | https://twitter.com/ehfcl | 45,670 |
| 6 | https://twitter.com/chrissyteigen | 39,989 |
| 7 | https://twitter.com/hillaryclinton | 32,184 |
| 8 | https://twitter.com/kimkardashian | 30,224 |
| 9 | https://twitter.com/tribunjabar | 26,401 |
| 10 | https://twitter.com/arianagrande | 25,462 |
| 11 | https://twitter.com/mlbpipeline | 21,896 |
| 12 | https://twitter.com/iheartradio | 21,289 |
| 13 | https://twitter.com/nhc_atlantic | 21,151 |
| 14 | https://twitter.com/nicolasmaduro | 20,376 |
| 15 | https://twitter.com/narendramodi | 19,070 |
TECHNICAL DETAILS
It took just a single SQL query and 13 seconds to compile the list above:
SELECT CONCAT('https://twitter.com/',LOWER(REGEXP_EXTRACT(SocialLink, r'twitter.com/([^/]+)/status'))) TwitterUser, count(1) Count FROM `gdelt-bq.gdeltv2.gkg_socialoutlinks`
where REGEXP_CONTAINS(SocialLink, r'twitter.com/[^/]+/status') group by TwitterUser order by Count desc