Disagreeing with Ruben Cober

Introduction

I am writing this as an addendum to my post critiquing Ruben Cober so readers can judge for themselves how the situation unfolded

What happened

Ruben Cober, self described critical analyst of news put out a post in which he criticized a poster paid for by a public broadcaster as unhealthy for Europe's future. He based this on the poster questioning whether children are the future or climate killers. (1)

The post strongly implied that public broadcasters are just putting out advertizements for political slogans to make fewer people in Europe have babies. The framing also aligns with a common right-wing narrative of taxpayer funds being used to promote degeneracy, with some in the comments going as far as to say that this is proof of "anti-white" propaganda.

Proof

These are all from his comment section. I'm not implying that he agrees with his sentiment, just pointing to the reactions to show that my read of the communicated message is accurate.

• "Taxpayer-funded by the way. And of course the children portrayed are white this time"
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• "Also not very “neutral” or “scientific”. Also also, note that, despite the last few years having what feels like a supermajority of advertisements featuring black women, they made super-duper sure all these depicted people were white."
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• "Ah I see the kids are white. Obviously."
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• "This is probably the first advertisement they’ve printed in years with exclusively white people in it. They don’t love the climate, they hate the Germans."
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• "I think we should make archive of civilization traitors. Once we will need it for political purges and deplatformings"
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• "That kind of degeneracy should warrant a woodchipper treatment."
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Correction

Two commenters argued that the post was misleading.

• "Everyone here has the media literacy of a small rabbit. This is from six years ago, advertising a documentary about a small British group of climate activists who decide not to have children (Birthstrike). Kids or no kids is the big question of the documentary, so the poster makes sense in that context. They could have done a more high concept image showing the absence of children, but this works fine. One would expect most viewers to not take the same position as the British couples in the documentary do. This is a bit like seeing an advertisement for My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding and thinking the telly wants you to get married to a gypsy."
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• "Confirmation below. Ruben Cober and Tired Moderate, I’m sure your audiences can count on a correction for pushing vintage ragebait slop. faktencheck.afp.com/doc…"
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Response

Ruben responded in the comments and made two dedicated posts.

The Comment:

• "No. Because I couldn’t care less what year this is from. It is still an advertisement that I consider to not be healty for Europe’s future, even if it is an documentary. Now go take your ‘fact check’ somewhere else, anonymous cretin"
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The posts

• // Literally just a meme
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• "Why are the anonymous ‘fact check’ ‘WELL AKSHUALLY’ cretins always the most insufferable of people. ThiS DeManDs a CoRRecTioN. No. Go away" //then the meme again//
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My Response

I agreed with the initial commenters that the post was misleading, but I also saw that they were unnecessarily confrontational, so I tried to tone down the rhetoric and confront Ruben Cober with the criticism in a more constructive manner:

• "Don’t you think that just an advertizement for having less kids and an advertizement for a documentary about a phenomenon are different in kind? I’d probably agree with you on the message being destructive (I saw one Arte documentary on Degrowth and it was horrible) but I think that it is very different when a shitty product is advertized than just a political slogan."
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After receiving no reply, I decided to make my own post