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I'd say that there's no such thing as 'white hat' and 'black hat' because Google doesn't want anyone trying to manipulate the SERP by artificially creating the conditions that are favoured with good rankings, there's only 'long term' and 'short term' SEO.  There's no point trying to distinguish between different types of things they don't want you to do, it's all frowned upon.

If they think that site is trying to manipulate the ranking algo then it'll probably get nerfed at some point so stick it in the 'short term' box.  The Google link algo is extremely sophisticated, if it picks up that all the sites on this network are interlinked, even if it's fantastically complicated and huge, I bet all the links will be worth nothing eventually, especially as they're advertising it

I think there is a difference between white hat and black hat. Black hat is often deceptive, while what hat simply helps the search engines get a better idea of what a site is about.