Yup. The whole article and “we should bring back bullying” rhetoric (even used ironically) just reeks of someone who doesn’t like “uncool” people and finally found a morally valid excuse to hate on some of them.
Really, not much different from misogynists pointing at random female tiktok influencers and concluding “See? This is why women are dumb and we need sexism”.
That’s a generalization. The White Rose was doing “advertising”, and I think that’s all but “by the wealthy, against the working class”.
Advertising has its place and can be beneficial to society, it just needs regulations (admittedly, A LOT of them).
We all know if every other way of advertising was banned, they’d start paying (or “incentivizing”) millions of people to “do word of mouth” for them.
And then we’ll have those people polluting every online space with unlabeled ads. No thank you.
I know, and that sucks. But outright banning something that has its benefits has always been detrimental (not to mention, they’d just find sneakier ways to do it and it’d be worse for everyone). We need regulations, a lot of them, not banning entirely.
Plus who are we kidding, everyone in power is so deep into the advertising/propaganda industry that neither of those options have a decent chance of happening in our lifetime.