And a story that is now on the top of the FT home page on this incident says that a "another flyer who claimed to be aboard the flight said on Twitter that Zhang’s comments were incorrect."

When someone goes directly to social media with a rant, vs. contacting the airline directly and privately, I am very skeptical of their words. At best, its likely highly exaggerated. I'll admit I've gone to Twitter before with bad experiences, but I've usually just DM'd if its a real issue. Seems like its another one of 'UA is getting slammed right now, so let's see if I can get some publicity/$ out of them.'