  Anthropomorphic social bots are engineered to emulate human verbal
communication and generate toxic or inflammatory content across social
networking services (SNSs). Bot-disseminated misinformation could subtly yet
profoundly reshape societal processes by complexly interweaving factors like
repeated disinformation exposure, amplified political polarization, compromised
indicators of democratic health, shifted perceptions of national identity,
propagation of false social norms, and manipulation of collective memory over
time. However, extrapolating bots' pluripotency across hybridized,
multilingual, and heterogeneous media ecologies from isolated SNS analyses
remains largely unknown, underscoring the need for a comprehensive framework to
characterise bots' emergent risks to civic discourse. Here we propose an
interdisciplinary framework to characterise bots' pluripotency, incorporating
quantification of influence, network dynamics monitoring, and interlingual
feature analysis. When applied to the geopolitical discourse around the
Russo-Ukrainian conflict, results from interlanguage toxicity profiling and
network analysis elucidated spatiotemporal trajectories of pro-Russian and
pro-Ukrainian human and bots across hybrid SNSs. Weaponized bots predominantly
inhabited X, while human primarily populated Reddit in the social media
warfare. This rigorous framework promises to elucidate interlingual homogeneity
and heterogeneity in bots' pluripotent behaviours, revealing synergistic
human-bot mechanisms underlying regimes of information manipulation, echo
chamber formation, and collective memory manifestation in algorithmically
structured societies.
