Database of Indian Social Media Influencers on Twitter

TL;DR

This paper presents a systematically curated database of 11,580 influential Indian Twitter accounts across various categories, enabling research on social media influence, polarization, and misinformation.

Contribution

It introduces a manually verified, categorized database of Indian Twitter influencers built through an iterative network-based process, filling a gap for social media influence studies in India.

Findings

Annotated 11,580 accounts across multiple categories.

Provides a resource for studying influence, polarization, and misinformation.

Manual classification ensures high-quality, reliable data.

Abstract

Databases of highly networked individuals have been indispensable in studying narratives and influence on social media. To support studies on Twitter in India, we present a systematically categorised database of accounts of influence on Twitter in India, identified and annotated through an iterative process of friends, networks, and self-described profile information, verified manually. We built an initial set of accounts based on the friend network of a seed set of accounts based on real-world renown in various fields, and then snowballed "friends of friends" multiple times, and rank ordered individuals based on the number of in-group connections, and overall followers. We then manually classified identified accounts under the categories of entertainment, sports, business, government, institutions, journalism, civil society accounts that have independent standing outside of social media, as well as a category of "digital first" referring to accounts that derive their primary influence from online activity. Overall, we annotated 11580 unique accounts across all categories. The database is useful studying various questions related to the role of influencers in polarisation, misinformation, extreme speech, political discourse etc.