While the authors may be Indian and Chinese, they are most definitely studying at Western Universities or at least collaborating with western universities in the majority of cases. Not sure what you’re on about.
I don’t think he’s lying but I also don’t think one could say that it is proven he hasn’t modified the system for his benefit just based on the public information on views/impressions/etc.
I imagine it wouldn’t be hard to fake these public facing numbers if a system was modified to boost his tweets.
While I get being skeptical these legacy news organizations, I also don’t see how we could trust Twitter directly in this situation especially given what we’ve already seen what happened under previous leadership there.
Edit: sorry if any of this came off as combative, I’m just irritated with people throwing out how things have been “proved” with equally subjective/potentially unreliable data.