  Radical right influencers routinely use social media to spread highly
divisive, disruptive and anti-democratic messages. Assessing and countering the
challenge that such content poses is crucial for ensuring that online spaces
remain open, safe and accessible. Previous work has paid little attention to
understanding factors associated with radical right content that goes viral. We
investigate this issue with a new dataset ROT which provides insight into the
content, engagement and followership of a set of 35 radical right influencers.
It includes over 50,000 original entries and over 40 million retweets, quotes,
replies and mentions. We use a multilevel model to measure engagement with
tweets, which are nested in each influencer. We show that it is crucial to
account for the influencer-level structure, and find evidence of the importance
of both influencer- and content-level factors, including the number of
followers each influencer has, the type of content (original posts, quotes and
replies), the length and toxicity of content, and whether influencers request
retweets. We make ROT available for other researchers to use.
