A five-year-old is certainly not capable of understanding the significance of such a decision, and it's disgusting to exploit such weakness for large sums of money.
> This is a 5 yr old... that's a whale. Of course we're going to refund him, he has no concept of the money he spent.
The term whale is just a description of the user's spending habits on the game and has not moral connotation attached to it.
Like "hyper addicted".
The moral issue here is that people generally do not want to be hunted and exploited for profit. They imply that people are prey by labeling them "whale".
I guess it depends on the environment, but it's common for (adult) whales in mobile games to know the term and use it in reference to themselves (and minnow, dolphin, etc).
How about we don't do corporate apologism eh