Noting that "academic research on the ways authoritarian regimes use social media bots, defined as algorithmically controlled social media accounts, in the context of domestic politics is scarce," the researchers set out to "bridge the gap between scholarship from the field of computer science on bot detection and research in political science on authoritarian politics by reverse-engineering the use of social media bots in a competitive authoritarian setting and identifying specific political strategies that can be pursued with the use of bots." This led the researchers to look specifically at the "observable implications for bot behavior during offline protests and increased online opposition activity," using a database to identify offline protests and activity related to 15 specific…