Yes, or maybe he didn't know or remember what influenced Tim Berners Lee to make them blue, so he just took credit for himself decades later, so yes.
Ben Shneiderman and his students originally performed experiments that determined that blue was the best color, then Ben developed and ACM distributed HyperTIES with blue links as "Hypertext on Hypertext", which Tim saw, and years later Tim told Ben that it influenced him to make the links blue.
Here is some email between Ben Shneiderman and Mark Andreessen about it that I posted to the Internet History mailing list archive with their permission:
Embedded menus: Selecting Items in Context; Larry Koved and Ben Shneiderman; Communications of the ACM, Computing Practices, April 1986, Volume 29, Number 4, p. 312-318:
An experimental comparison of a mouse and arrow-jump keys for an interactive encyclopedia; John Ewing, Simin Mehrabanzad, Scott Sheck, Dan Ostroff and Ben Shneiderman; International Journal of Man Machine Studies (1986) 24, p. 29-45:
Ben Shneiderman and his students originally performed experiments that determined that blue was the best color, then Ben developed and ACM distributed HyperTIES with blue links as "Hypertext on Hypertext", which Tim saw, and years later Tim told Ben that it influenced him to make the links blue.
Here is some email between Ben Shneiderman and Mark Andreessen about it that I posted to the Internet History mailing list archive with their permission:
https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2020-Apri...
Hypertext on Hypertext CACM1988 - Ben demonstrating HyperTIES with blue hyperlinks, the system that influenced Tim:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29b4O2xxeqg
And a couple of relevant papers:
Embedded menus: Selecting Items in Context; Larry Koved and Ben Shneiderman; Communications of the ACM, Computing Practices, April 1986, Volume 29, Number 4, p. 312-318:
https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/Koved-Embedded%20Menue...
An experimental comparison of a mouse and arrow-jump keys for an interactive encyclopedia; John Ewing, Simin Mehrabanzad, Scott Sheck, Dan Ostroff and Ben Shneiderman; International Journal of Man Machine Studies (1986) 24, p. 29-45:
https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/Ewing-Ostroff-mouse-ar...