Research note on the Radical Right Research Robot

Over the last 15 years, social media have become an integral part of science infrastructure. The emergence of “Science Twitter“, the collective of scholars active on the platform now known as “X”, is a particularly prominent example of this trend. Within such communities, automated services (“bots”) can play an important role by raising public and internal awareness of publications in the field, fostering connections amongst researchers, and stimulating serendipitous insights.

• Arzheimer, Kai. “Automating awareness, digitizing dissemination: the radical right research robot as a template for (political) science communication in a fragmented social media landscape.” Political Research Exchange 7.1 (2025): 2549079. doi:10.1080/2474736X.2025.2549079
  [BibTeX] [Abstract] [DATA]
  

  Over the last 15 years, social media have become an integral part of the science infrastructure. The emergence of ‘Science Twitter’, the collective of scholars active on the platform now known as ‘X’, is a particularly prominent example of this trend. Within such communities, automated services (‘bots’) can play an important role by raising public and internal awareness of publications in the field, fostering connections amongst researchers, and stimulating serendipitous insights. In this note, I discuss the architecture of one such service: the Radical Right Research Robot (RRRR), written in the R programming language, which posts references and links to contributions from the vast literature on radical right/far-right parties and their voters. I also describe the various R packages and other open source tools on which RRRR relies. This description could serve as a template for similar bots in other fields. Finally, I discuss the challenges resulting from Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter and the subsequent decline of Science Twitter. RRRR has already branched out to two alternative text-based networks (Mastodon and Bluesky) and may eventually disengage from Twitter. While the technical difficulties involved are relatively easy to solve, fundamental issues related to platform ownership and governance persist.

  @Article{arzheimer-2025c,
  author = {Kai Arzheimer},
  title = {Automating awareness, digitizing dissemination: the radical right
  research robot as a template for (political) science communication
  in a fragmented social media landscape},
  journal = {Political Research Exchange},
  year = 2025,
  volume = 7,
  number = 1,
  pages = 2549079,
  abstract = {Over the last 15 years, social media have become an integral part
  of the science infrastructure. The emergence of ‘Science Twitter’,
  the collective of scholars active on the platform now known as ‘X’,
  is a particularly prominent example of this trend. Within such
  communities, automated services (‘bots’) can play an important role
  by raising public and internal awareness of publications in the
  field, fostering connections amongst researchers, and stimulating
  serendipitous insights. In this note, I discuss the architecture of
  one such service: the Radical Right Research Robot (RRRR), written
  in the R programming language, which posts references and links to
  contributions from the vast literature on radical right/far-right
  parties and their voters. I also describe the various R packages
  and other open source tools on which RRRR relies. This description
  could serve as a template for similar bots in other fields.
  Finally, I discuss the challenges resulting from Elon Musk's
  takeover of Twitter and the subsequent decline of Science Twitter.
  RRRR has already branched out to two alternative text-based
  networks (Mastodon and Bluesky) and may eventually disengage from
  Twitter. While the technical difficulties involved are relatively
  easy to solve, fundamental issues related to platform ownership and
  governance persist.},
  pdf = {https://www.kai-arzheimer.com/radical-right-research-robot-research-note.pdf},
  data = {https://gitlab.rlp.net/arzheim/rrresrobot},
  doi = {10.1080/2474736X.2025.2549079}
  }

In a new research note, I discuss the architecture of one such service: the Radical Right Research Robot (RRRR). The bot was born back in February 2018 during my state at the Munk School. Since then, it has posted regularly, apart from a few outages caused by the chaos at Twitter.

RRRR is written in the R programming language. It posts references and links to contributions from the vast literature on radical right/far-right parties and their voters. In the note, I describe the various R packages and other open source tools on which RRRR relies. This description could serve as a template for similar bots in other fields. The bot’s codebase is available here.

Finally, I discuss the challenges resulting from Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter and the subsequent decline of Science Twitter. RRRR has already branched out to two alternative text-based networks: you can follow it on Mastodon, and/or on Bluesky) and may eventually disengage from Twitter. While the technical difficulties involved with migration are relatively easy to solve, fundamental issues related to platform ownership and governance persist.

You can read the full research note here, or download the PDF.

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