Although Lady Gaga is the most-followed person on Twitter, she is not considered the "most influential" member of the Twitterati.
Research conducted in 2009 by Daniel Romero, Wojciech Galuba, Sitaram Asur, and Bernardo A. Huberman at the Social Computing Lab of HP Labs ranks Twitter's most influential news-media accounts by how many followers each account has and how engaged those followers are. New Scientist reported the findings, which show that the most influential Twitter feeds maintain followers who frequently retweet content. In addition, Gizmodo notes, "sites that are able to influence passive users to retweet more often than they normally do get a corresponding ranking bump."
A list of the most influential news-media feeds contains some surprising results. For instance, the New York Times (2,502,914 followers) sits at #22, while photojournalism blog The Big Picture (23,000 followers) enjoys the #3 spot.
Below, see the top 20 news media Twitter feeds:
The Most Influential Accounts
To see the full list of the 100 most influential Twitter feeds, click here.
Note: An earlier version of this post attributed the story to Cornell University; it was actually conducted by the Social Computing Lab of HP Labs, and has been edited to reflect that point.