Are you part of the advertising or not?

In the past we often thought about this very topic: Are we the product?
The question was born on products like google, facebook, twitter, where by not paying a dime you were wondering: how do they make money?

The answer was (and still is) that they sold your information, your data (or part of it), so that people could make use of it to target advertising.

There’s more to it though.
Think about your social interactions. It’s not like a forum, on facebook your comments are visible and often fill up other people feeds.

So let’s say that a political candidate put a big image on his post, with a mistake.
Maybe it’s a candidate you hate, and a friend of yours is a fan and put a like to that photo.
You see that, and you see the mistake in the photo, it’s claiming to be in a city that it’s not the one pictured in the photo.

You think “he’s an idiot, and I want to prove to the world how stupid he is, maybe this way they’ll stop voting for him”.
And following this thought you comment that photo saying that the city is wrong.

Here’s the thing: They might have tricked you from the beginning. Not only you are the product in facebook, not only  they can sell your data to others, but now you interacted on purpose and activated a social interaction that will advertise a photo without them paying a dime.

The trickiest joke of all is the one where they trick you 2 times in a row, like this one.
Maybe this should teach us one thing that we should also learn IRL: Think twice before opening your mouth.