Census of Twitter Users: Scraping and Describing the National Network of South Korea

Population-level national networks on social media are precious and essential for network science and behavioural science. This study proposes a data collection strategy for scraping online social networks at the population level, and thereby serving as a “ground truth” for the validation of both ego-centric and socio-centric data collection approaches. We proposed a set of validation approaches to evaluate the validity of our approach. Finally, we re-examined classical network and communication propositions (e.g., 80/20 rule, six degrees of separation) on the national network. Our proposed strategy would largely flourish the data collection pool of population-level social networks and further develop the research of network analysis in digital media environment.