Did Facebook just stop fighting adblockers?

Question

One of my hobbies is writing userscripts, specifically adblockers for sites I frequent. Facebook in particular proved a great and worthy adversary on that front, thanks to their attempts to thwart my userscripts. Until very recently, they employed a unique combination of obfuscation techniques to prevent adblockers from programmatically identifying and removing their "Sponsored" posts.Anyway, until recently I had a working (albeit hacky) adblock heuristic for Facebook that did the job. However, sometime today I noticed that my script stopped working.Upon further inspection, they seem to have gone back to simply embedding the word "Sponsored" in plaintext, making it trivial for userscripts and adblockers to select and remove these elements.Is it a fluke, or did Facebook just give up fighting adblock?

dmortin · Accepted Answer

There were news in the past about laws which compel web companies to make their sites accessible for screen readers for the blind. Aren't FB's obfuscation techniques against the law, because they prevent screen readers from reading/identifying sponsored posts as such?

endorphine · Answer

Not a Facebook user, but I wouldn't hold my breath: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32129100

yubiox · Answer

Now please let us remove "People you may know" and "Suggested for you" crap too.

vemv · Answer

Perhaps they decided that the code complexity is not worth the effort (vs. the % of users that will have an adblocker on)

habibur · Answer

I installed a popular ad blocker for facebook from chrome store some months back.Was surprised that it's still working now. Generally those don't work after a few days.

Markoff · Answer

If you are bored feel free to visit Novinky.cz / Seznamzpravy.cz both one of the most visited news websites in Czechia, they are pretty good with breaking website once you start blocking ads.

chucky123 · Answer

Interesting. Just checked fb and sponsored is inside a single span. Maybe they are ab testing.

sgammon · Answer

Let's just hope they aren't preparing to launch a cloud