While I understand your perspective, I don't follow the vindication. Viral marketing is a marketing strategy, it is taught in marketing classes. Isn't it naive to believe everything you see on the internet?
Teaching young people to be dishonest in a school setting doesn't somehow make it legitimate. It makes those classes bad. Science classes aren't telling their students that they could advance their career a lot faster and with less work if they just make up data for their experiments. They acknowledge it happens, condemn it, and tell students they'll be failed or expelled for doing it.
It is naive, yet it is still read, believed and scored (and score gives it more trust). The medium still seems trustworthy but the individuals within it are not. And as the internet has progressed, the percentage of trustworthiness has slipped, but can also not be intuited directly from the medium as there are no signals that have meaningfully changed in the medium.
Only anecdotes from outside the medium can inform us to be less naive. Or doing an analysis which takes effort, skill, and time per-person
