Okay, so that is definitely a conspiracy theory. However, conspiracies can be real, being a conspiracy does not make it false. For example, Facebook was alleged to be inflating their ad numbers, and actually got sued for it:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/18/tech/facebook-ad-reach-lawsuit/index.html
Twitter is likely doing the same thing. When I look at "trending" topics (which might be manually placed there) I can see somewhere around half the accounts are fake. I don't check all of them, but doing like a spot check of 20 or 30 users, you can see maybe half of them just joined, have only a few posts (or none) and have little to no followers. Usually they post on controversial topics, on both sides, but can also be used for advertisement. This is likely what Twitter is hiding from Musk.
In terms of my own experience, I have around 3,000 followers on Twitter. But I actually only get around the same 50 people interacting with my posts. I also follow around 5,000 people, but always see posts from the same maybe 100 accounts, or see posts from people I don't even follow. I know these people are still active, cause I can search for them and see they post like every day. But I haven't seen a post for them in years, even though we are friends in real life. So the algorithm is carefully curating what I see, and also who sees what I post. Why they are doing this is anyone's guess, and you kind of go into a rabbit hole if you think too long about it.
In terms of Steam lying, it's possible, but it doesn't account for sales. Yes, they could inflate traffic numbers, but I can also see download count, time played, etc. which would be crazy if they were faking all of it. I also doubt bots are buying games, but that is not totally fantasy. For example, Amazon has a huge issue with fake reviews or bot reviews, and it says verified purchase. I know how to spot bots, and it's huge on Amazon. Or they will have real people (like from a competitor) buy a product and give it a bad review, break it and say it's cheap quality and post a picture, etc. I've read some articles that estimate fake reviews on Amazon are anywhere from 25% to 50%, and I would believe that.
I think YouTube is probably a safe website though. Because you can see the people's faces, hear their voice, see how many subs they have, when they joined, how many videos uploaded, etc. There are fake videos, but it is much much harder to fake that. So if you have game reviews on YouTube, Twitch streamers, etc. that is most likely real.
But real people can also have agendas. Like the new Matrix movie got trashed, by the press and by the community. However, the movie was great. One of the best movies ever, and even better than the first one possibly. However, I noticed that there was so much bad press, like unreasonably so. Even if the movie was bad, people were on a vendetta. So I started reading all the reviews on big tech sites. And, sure, I'm not saying everyone has to like the movie. People have different tastes, sure. But there were verifiable lies in the article. One about a voice dubbing mistake that wasn't there (I watched the scene like 10 times, and it didn't happen). Others saying how there were no guns in the movie, which didn't make sense, the whole movie is action packed for 2 hours. Just stuff that was factually wrong. To the point where I thought there was something else going on. I even posted a positive comment about the movie on the official Facebook page and got harassed. People claimed I was actually Lana Wachowski with an alt account. That Warner Bros had paid me to make the comment, and other total nonsense. Like, I understand not everyone likes the same things. But the movie was great, and because I said I liked it, I must have been bribed by Warner Bros? What the hell is going on, I think it's more likely they were paid to attack me, or make the movie look bad. Usually when people make false accusations, it's really them that are the ones that did it.
