Automating awareness, digitizing dissemination : the radical right research robot as a template for (political) science communication in a fragmented social media landscape

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.