How Influencers and Multipliers Drive Polarization and Issue Alignment on Twitter/X - Data

Description

We provide anonymized retweet networks extracted from trending topics in Germany collected between 2021 to 2023. 

More specifically, we collected tweets from 2021-03-29 to 2023-07-12 according to the following scheme: at the beginning of each day, we launched a script that collects the current "trending topics" (from now on referred to as "trends") in Germany using the Twitter Trend API (v1). By default, trends are personalized based on the account's Twitter/X usage. One can, however, disable the personalization by setting a specific location from which to draw the trending topics, which then yields "popular topics among people in a specific geographic location" (X/Twitter2025). We re-ran the script every 15 minutes. At the end of each day, we counted the number of times each trending topic appeared during the day and kept the top 5 most frequent ones. This gave us a proxy of the five most important trending topics for that day. We then used the Twitter Search API (v1) to collect German-speaking tweets using the exact trend keyword as a query on the day it trended and the day after (48hrs). All the tweets were collected using a single Twitter API key, collecting tweets for maximally 24 hours every day. 

For each trend, we extract a retweet network, in which nodes are Twitter users and a directed link is drawn from user $i$ to $j$ if $i$ retweets $j$. We provide one retweet network for each trend as a csv after anonymizing the user_ids. There is one csv for each trend containing the columns source,target,weight. The filename contains the date and the keyword that was searched:

T<trend_idx>_<date>_<search_query>.csv

All the individual files are contained in rtn.zip.

Additionally, we computed a topic model on the full text of tweets which allowed us to classify each trend into one larger metatopic (such as Covid, Climate Change, Sports, ...). This topic assignment is contained in trend2topic.csv. For more information on the topic model, please refer to the paper [insert link here].

How to cite

If you use this data, please cite:

Pournaki, A., F. Gaisbauer, and E. Olbrich. "How Influencers and Multipliers Drive Polarization and Issue Alignment on Twitter/X." Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. Vol. 19. 2025.