The GDELT Project

The Top Newsworthy Twitter Accounts Of 2016-2019

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