Radical Right On Twitter (ROT)

We collected the Radical Right On Twitter dataset (ROT7) to advance research into radical right activity online. The resource addresses a lack of data in this field, particularly data that relates to the activity of radical right actors. The dataset was funded without commercial support.

ROT follows six months of Twitter activity (8th July 2020 to 9th January 2021) from 35 radical right actors. We follow the advice given by Williams, Burnap, and Sloan (2017) for publishing Twitter data on sensitive topics. ROT includes:

It contains:

1.  Actors' content: all content produced by the actors, including posts (n = 22,131), replies (n = 19,947), quotes (n = 11,314), and retweets (n = 37,283).
2. Actors' profiles: Twitter profile information for all 35 actors.
3. Actors' followers: a list of each actor's followers, collected each day (combined n = 6,592,056).
4. Actors' friends: a list of each actor's friends, collected each day (combined n = 262,856).
5. Direct engagement: all tweets which engage with actors, including replies, quotes and retweets (n = 31,443,828).
6. Engagers’ followers: List of followers of every user who replied, quoted or retweeted actors' content. We only collected users' list of followers once, even if they engaged with the actors multiple times during the period studied.
7. Other engagement: all other tweets collected through Twitter API that mentions an actor (n = 10,939,868).