As of August 2023, X (formerly Twitter) CEO Elon Musk was the most followed person on the platform, with little over 140 million followers. Additionally, former U.S. President Barack Obama amassed 132 million followers on the micro-blogging service. In April 2023, Musk changed Twitter's legal name to X Corp.

Celebrities and Twitter

Founded in 2006 as Twitter, X is an online social networking and microblogging service that allows users to post text-based status updates and messages of up to 280 characters in length. As of the fourth quarter of 2020, X had 192 million monetizable daily active users (mDAU) worldwide.

X provides a near-instant access channel to celebrities. The majority of the top ten most-followed X accounts are entertainers who use the medium to communicate with fans, spread relevant news regarding their work or work on their public image. The near-instant gratification through a stream of direct updates from celebrities or personalities as well as the feeling of belonging to a particular group of fans is a popular reason for social media users to use X. In order to establish authenticity of identity on X, accounts of people from high-interest areas such as music, fashion, entertainment, politics, media, business or other areas as well as individuals at high risk of impersonation are verified by X. The verification badge symbolizes that the account is maintained by a legitimate source.

Major sporting events and industry award shows such as the Super Bowl, the Grammy Awards or Academy Awards generate lots of online buzz on X. The online discussion allows users to participate in the success of celebrities who often post behind-the-scenes photo tweets or commentaries. On-set or in-concert tweets are further methods of celebrities enhancing their appeal, and level of fan interaction.

Last Update: 02 May 2022

Context

This dataset contains lists of the top Twitter celebrity accounts

Download

kaggle API Command !kaggle datasets download -d ahmedshahriarsakib/top-1000-twitter-celebrity-accounts

Content

The dataset has a single CSV file, contains 987 Celebrity users - - twitter_username (Celebrity Twitter username) - twitter_userid (Twitter user id) - domain (Celebrity Domain / site link) - name (Celebrity name) - followers_count (Followers Count ) - tweet_count (Tweets Count )

NB:

• There are some unofficial Celebrity accounts (ex - twitter.com/sonunigam) with a very small amount of tweets.

Featured Notebook

• Twitter Celebrity Matcher (SBERT+ Tweepy)

Acknowledgements

Data was collected from -

• Top-1000-Celebrity-Twitter-Accounts.csv - GitHub gist

Cover Image -

Photo by mohamed_hassan from PxHere

In 2020, 189 countries were represented through an official presence on Twitter, either by personal or institutional accounts run by heads of state and government and foreign ministers. During the measured period, U.S. President Donald Trump was ranked first, having accumulated over 81.1 million Twitter followers on his personal account. The official @POTUS account was ranked fifth with 30.2 million followers worldwide. Heads of state on Twitter Twitter is a very conversational social platform, allowing users to communicate in a very public manner. Foreign ministries utilize Twitter to expand their online presence and digital diplomatic networks, and government officials are encouraged to interact with the public. The most conversational world leader on Twitter is the Government of Nepal, with 96 percent of their tweets being @ replies to other Twitter users. Another more subtle layer of Twitter diplomacy is the mutual following of peers between official heads of state, minister and other government accounts – as of June 2020, the Foreign Ministry of Iceland (@MFAIceland) was ranked first, having 147 mutual connections with other world leaders and foreign ministries on Twitter. During the measured period, @realDonaldTrump, @POTUS and the @WhiteHouse Twitter accounts did not follow any other foreign leaders. In 2018, the account of the U.S. State Department had only 59 mutual peer connections on Twitter, painting a relatively isolated picture in terms of international political communications. Trump on Twitter Donald Trump’s prolific Twitter usage is a hotly debated topic. The President uses Twitter on a daily basis to make comments about other politicians, celebrities and daily news, sometimes antagonizing others with his controversial statements. According to an August 2018 survey, 61 percent of U.S. adults stated that Trump's use of Twitter as President of the United States was inappropriate, while only 24 percent of respondents said the opposite. In total, 90 percent of respondents who identified as Democrats thought that Trump's Twitter use was inappropriate; while on the other end of the political spectrum only 35 percent of respondents identifying as Republicans reported having the same opinion.

With over 611 million monthly active users, building a huge Twitter following is not an easy task. These are the top 25 accounts with the most followers on Twitter right now.

Football teams Real Madrid and FC Barcelona were the most popular Spanish Twitter accounts in 2022 by number of followers. Real's main profile ranked first, with almost 47 million followers. Meanwhile, FC Barcelona's international and Spanish-speaking profiles ranked second and third, with 45.9 million and 21.1 million followers each. Overall, football has dominated the micro-blogging platform in Spain, with players such as Gerard Piqué, Sergio Ramos, and Radamel Falcao being among the most popular profiles on Twitter that year.

As of October 2025, social network X (formerly known as Twitter) was most popular in the United States, with an audience reach of approximately 99.04 million users. Japan ranked second, recording more than 71 million users on the platform. Global Twitter usage As of the second quarter of 2021, X/Twitter had 206 million monetizable daily active users worldwide. The most-followed Twitter accounts include figures such as Elon Musk, Justin Bieber and former U.S. president Barack Obama. X/Twitter and politics X/Twitter has become an increasingly relevant tool in domestic and international politics. The platform has become a way to promote policies and interact with citizens and other officials, and most world leaders and foreign ministries have an official Twitter account. Former U.S. president Donald Trump used to be a prolific Twitter user before the platform permanently suspended his account in January 2021. During an August 2018 survey, 61 percent of respondents stated that Trump's use of Twitter as President of the United States was inappropriate.

Twitter is ranked as the 12h most popular social media site in the world. The platform currently has 611 million active monthly users.

-This Dataset was gathered by crawling Twitter's REST API using the Python library tweepy 3. This dataset contains the tweets of the 20 most popular twitter users (with the most followers) whereby retweets are neglected. These accounts belong to public people, such as Katy Perry and Barack Obama, platforms, YouTube, Instagram, and television channels shows, e.g., CNN Breaking News and The Ellen Show. -Consequently, the dataset contains a mix of relatively structured tweets, tweets written in a formal and informative manner, and completely unstructured tweets written in a colloquial style. Unfortunately, the geocoordinates were not available for those tweets. - H -This Dataset has been used to generate reserach paper under title "Machine Learning Techniques for Anomalies Detection in Post Arrays". -Crawled attributes are: Author (Twitter User), Content (Tweet), Date_Time, id (Twitter User ID), language (Tweet Langugage), Number_of_Likes, Number_of_Shares. Overall: 52543 tweets of top 20 users in twitter Screen_Name #Tweets Time span (in days) TheEllenShow 3,147 - 662 jimmyfallon 3,123 - 1231 ArianaGrande 3,104 - 613 YouTube 3,077 - 411 KimKardashian 2,939 - 603 katyperry 2,924 - 1,598 selenagomez 2,913 - 2,266 rihanna 2,877 - 1,557 BarackObama 2,863 - 849 britneyspears 2,776 - 1,548 instagram 2,577 - 456 shakira 2,530 - 1,850 Cristiano 2,507 - 2,407 jtimberlake 2,478 - 2,491 ladygaga 2,329 - 894 Twitter 2,290 - 2,593 ddlovato 2,217 - 741 taylorswift13 2,029 - 2,091 justinbieber 2,000 - 664 cnnbrk 1,842 - 183

Context

This dataset contains tweets and embeddings of the top 1000 Twitter celebrity accounts

Content

1. Tweets -

   • Contains 915 celebrity users' tweets
   • The tweets were scraped using tweepy - a python wrapper of Twitter API; following this celebrity list
   • Top 1000 Twitter Celebrity Accounts

2. Embeddings -

   • A single CSV file containing embeddings of all tweets (each user per row)
   • After preprocessing the tweets, the tweets were embedded using sentence-transformers pre-trained multilingual model - paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2.
   • You can also find the embedding data here - Twitter Celebrity Embed Data

NB: - There are almost 10% of the Twitter accounts were private, changed their username, or suspended. In the end, the number of users remains 915. - There are some unofficial Celebrity accounts (ex - twitter.com/sonunigam) with a very small amount of tweets. We can filter those users based on their tweet count. Here is a good research paper on this topic - 25 Tweets to Know You: A New Model to Predict Personality with Social Media

Featured Notebook

• Twitter Celebrity Matcher (SBERT+ Tweepy)

Live App

GitHub Project

• ahmedshahriar/TwitterCelebrityMatcher

Download

kaggle API Command

!kaggle datasets download -d ahmedshahriarsakib/top-1000-twitter-celebrity-tweets-embeddings

Disclaimer

The tweets which were scraped are all publicly available and it's intended for educational purposes only.

Acknowledgement

Cover image credit - bestfunquiz- Which Celebrity On Twitter Should Follow You

These are the key Twitter user statistics that you need to know.

In 2020, Donald Trump (@realdonaldtrump), was ranked as the most influential Twitter user worldwide. Other top-tweeters included Narendra Modi (@narendramodi), Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) and Elon Musk (@elonmusk). Influencers were ranked on the level of genuine engagement users created within the year. The amount of followers, retweets, replies, and the more influential the people users engaged with all together determined the score.

We collected the data of a Twitter user using Tweepy to access the Twitter API. We crawled the list of each user account’s followers. Twitter allowed a request of a maximum of 200 tweets per time window and because of limitations of the Twitter API, we could only make a request every 15 minutes. Next, we obtained the most recent tweets of each user in the study. We extracted the most common hashtags used in the sample tweets and crawled the most recent 50 tweets that contained each hashtag and tweets that mentioned a particular user, for example ’@username.’ Initially, we chose 101 user accounts and documented the attributes of each user’s account (number of followers, a list of followers, and the recent tweets of each follower).

The football player Zlatan Ibrahimović, had the most followed account on Twitter in Sweden as of December 2020. In fact, roughly *** million people followed him on the platform, which was way ahead of the environmental activist Greta Thunberg, who ranked second with roughly *** million followers. The Swedish DJ and record producer, Alesso, ranked third, with nearly *** million followers. Overall, musicians had a strong presence in the ranking list, which includes Swedish House Mafia, Avicii, Axwell, Zara Larsson, and Sebastian Ingrosso. Twitter in Sweden The share of Twitter users in Sweden increased significantly. While eight percent of the interviewed Swedes used the platform in 2011, ** percent did in 2019. The usage penetration peaked in 2017, when ** percent of the respondents were on the platform. Another survey took place in Sweden in 2019, regarding the purposes of using Twitter. It was discovered that ** percent of the respondents used it for news and ** percent used it for entertainment. Twitter ranked sixth As of 2019, ** percent of the internet users interviewed in Sweden reported to be using Twitter. Thus, it ranked sixth among other social media platforms. Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat led the ranking that year. Overall, the share of individuals who participated in social networks increased over time. ** percent of the Swedes created profiles and posted messages in 2011 and ** percent in 2019.

The US has historically been the target country for Twitter since its launch in 2006. This is the full breakdown of Twitter users by country.

The US has the largest number of Twitter users with over a 100 million users. They account for about 16.7% of all Twitter users worldwide.

A list of the most popular (top 100 by followers) Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok users. NB! For YouTube the followers are subscribers and the posts are videos.

Top 50 Followed Accounts on Twitter scraped from Wikipedia as updated on December 14, 2022. Includes Rank-wise details of Twitter users like Twitter handle, Owner name, their occupation, nationality and number of followers in Millions with highest followed user on top.

Abstract (our paper)

Why does Smith follow Johnson on Twitter? In most cases, the reason why users follow other users is unavailable. In this work, we answer this question by proposing TagF, which analyzes the who-follows-whom network (matrix) and the who-tags-whom network (tensor) simultaneously. Concretely, our method decomposes a coupled tensor constructed from these matrix and tensor. The experimental results on million-scale Twitter networks show that TagF uncovers different, but explainable reasons why users follow other users.

Data

coupled_tensor: The first column is the source user id (from user id), the second column is the destination user id (to user id), and the third column is the tag id.

users.id: The first column is the user id for coupled_tensor, and the second column is the user id on Twitter.

tags.id: The first column is the tag id for coupled_tensor, and the second column is the tag (i.e. slug or list name) on Twitter. On the tags, ###follow### and ###friend### are special tags expressing follower and following.

Publication

This dataset was created for our study. If you make use of this dataset, please cite: Yuto Yamaguchi, Mitsuo Yoshida, Christos Faloutsos, Hiroyuki Kitagawa. Why Do You Follow Him? Multilinear Analysis on Twitter. Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW '15 Companion). pp.137-138, 2015. http://doi.org/10.1145/2740908.2742715

Code

Our code outputting experiment results made available at: https://github.com/yamaguchiyuto/tagf

Note

If you would like to use larger dataset, the dataset on 1 million seed users made available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16267 (The dataset on 0.1 million seed users is not subset of the dataset on 1 million seed users.)

This is the breakdown of Twitter users by age group.

Context

This is a copy of the dataset used in the "Most popular Twitter bots" article on botwiki.org.

You can get the most up-to-date version of this dataset on glitch.com.

Content

This dataset contains a list of creative (mostly non-spammy) Twitter bots that have a substantial number of followers (more than 10,000). The top 30 accounts on the list are used in the Botwiki article.

Acknowledgements

I mainly used the bots submitted to Botwiki and Tully Hansen’s Omnibots Twitter list for data collection.