JSON data from Twitter to Edgelist?
I've found another answer on https://github.com/alexhanna to this question  that I've been able to adapt and enrich to somewhat meet my needs:

import json
import sys
from csv import writer
import time
from datetime import datetime

startTime = datetime.now()

with open(sys.argv[1]) as in_file, \
    open(sys.argv[2], 'w') as out_file:
    print &gt;&gt; out_file
    csv = writer(out_file)
    tweet_count = 0

    for line in in_file:
        tweet_count += 1
        try:
            tweet = json.loads(line)
        except:
            pass

        if not (isinstance(tweet, dict)):
            pass
        elif 'delete' in tweet:
            pass
        elif 'user' not in tweet:
            pass
        else:
            if 'entities' in tweet and len(tweet['entities']['user_mentions']) &gt; 0:
                user = tweet['user']
                user_mentions = tweet['entities']['user_mentions']

                for u2 in user_mentions:
                    print ",".join([
                        user['screen_name'],
                        u2['screen_name']
                        ])

#values = [(value.encode('utf8') if hasattr(value, 'encode') else value) for value in row]
#csv.writerow(values)

print "File Imported:", str(sys.argv[1])
print "# Tweets Imported:", tweet_count
print "File Exported:", str(sys.argv[2])
print "Time Elapsed:", (datetime.now()-startTime)