Coloring in the Altmetric Donut

Is it possible to manipulate the Altmetric score by using a social media echo chamber? Recently we came across something that triggered our curiosity. A university professor told us that she had created a series of social media profiles to inflate her Altmetric scores. Whenever publishing she herself would tweet and re-tweet the DOI of the publication and in this way enhance her own Altmetric performance. Following this, we made a small scale experiment. We encouraged our colleagues to tweet and re-tweet the DOI of a publication and found to our surprise that interest in this article spiraled out beyond our usual network, making a relatively inferior piece of work skyrocket towards the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric.
To examine the pliability of altmetric scores in a structured way, we will write an editorial in a scientific journal encouraging readers to share the DOI of the editorial on various social media platforms. We will track the effect of this engineered social engagement on the Altmetric donut over time. We will then use this altmetric engagement pattern as a baseline for our next experiment, examining the effect of a social media echo chamber. We will create a new DOI with no text behind it on Zenodo and a series of artificial profiles mimicking the exact patterns identified in the first experiment. We will see to what extent we can attain equal or even higher altmetric scores. Finally, we will track whether the DOI has had actual social engagement or has only been mentioned within our echo chamber.