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The most-followed Twitter users and their pairwise relationships form a subgraph of Twitter users that we call the Twitter elite network. The connectivity patterns and information exchanges (in terms of replies and retweets) among these elite users illustrate how the “important” users connect and interact with one another on Twitter. At the same time, such an elite-focused view also provides valuable information about the structure of the Twitter network as a whole. This paper presents a detailed characterization of the structure and evolution of the top 10K Twitter elite network. We describe our technique for efficiently and accurately constructing the Twitter elite network along with social attributes of individual elite accounts and apply it to capture two snapshots of the top 10K elite network that are some 2.75 years apart. We show that a sufficiently large elite network is typically composed of 14–20 stable and …