As the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues to unfold, social media platforms are clamping down on Russian state-owned media, a key lever the Kremlin uses to spread propaganda and disinformation. The survival of non-democratic regimes in part depends on their ability to manage the information environment in this way. Social media has become a key ingredient in autocrats’ toolkits of how to respond to online opposition, which includes the use of trolls and automated bot accounts. But what are bots? What work do they do? And how might this social media tool be used in authoritarian regimes to help such regimes? In their new article, authors Stukal, Sanovich, Bonneau, and Tucker explore these pressing questions through an investigation of the use of pro-government Twitter bots within Russia during times of both offline and online political protests.