35 ms·

How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers

395 points by ganderzz 7y ago

crakenzak 7y ago
Interesting article. I don't blame Facebook for doing whatever they can to properly show ads tho, they provide a "free" service and in exchange serve ads. It's not free to support a company their size and its expected they do everything they can to monetize the site properly. What do you guys think?
- oferzelig 7y ago
  So you're basically against ad blockers.
  - dannyr 7y ago
    If a business chooses how they make money to survive, can you just say "I don't like how you make money so I'll just get everything for free"? If you don't like how a company uses ads (regular, spammy, deceptive), no better way than tell them than by not giving them any traffic at all.
    - baroffoos 7y ago
      Users are allowed to control how they view content on their own computer. Facebook has chosen to give the content out for free and users may choose to render the content however they wish. Facebook is free to charge for the service.
      - dannyr 7y ago
        "Facebook has chosen to give the content out for free". No, it's not free. Facebook makes money off data from its users.
        baroffoos 7y ago
        The "free" in this case is the fact that they have not charged any fee to obtain the data.
        dannyr 7y ago
        Let me paraphrase your statement then ""Facebook has chosen to give the content out for free BY SERVING ADS".
        baroffoos 7y ago
        And the user is in no way obligated to look at the ads. If I start a business giving away things for free expecting the users to pay me back later but in no way requiring them to and it doesn't work out then thats just a bad business model.
    - ACow_Adonis 7y ago
      The internet/web is USED by businesses. The internet/web is not FOR businesses. Perhaps that's the fundamental difference in perspective about who's responsibility it is to make allowances for who serves/receives content...
    - rdiddly 7y ago
      In this case, yes, yes you can. Although note that the value flows in the other direction. We're getting Facebook content (worthless), they're getting our attention (valuable).
  - squeaky-clean 7y ago
    You can be in favor of both sides of this argument, I would say I am. I believe in my right to modify what's running on my computer and network, including things like installing adblocker extensions and pi-hole and so on. But I also believe that no organization is obligated to serve their data to me in a way that makes it easy to block those ads. They are wasting CPU hours and man hours on obfuscation features rather than real value to the end user. But nothing is really wrong with that, it's just a bit silly. If they think it makes them more profit overall than actually enhancing Facebook, they can take that bet. (I think it's the wrong bet, but they can still take it)
    - ACow_Adonis 7y ago
      That's basically my attitude too, and I'd consider myself one of the more pro-adblocker advocates. I see the internet as a bunch of servers talking to each other. Some make requests to others, some respond to those requests by sending content. You can block me, you can choose to not send or respond data to my requests, and you can send your website/content in some form that's better suited to Perl golf or the obfuscated C contest. That's your prerogative. On my end, I get to decide who I send my requests to, how I spend my time and attention, and what I do on my machine with incoming requests and data. Make your site bad enough, and I (and others) will stop going, and eventually you'll likely sow the seeds of your own destruction (as people move away and create competition), but fundamentally that's your call to make. Just like its mine to ignore you or your requests that I talk to your affiliated servers, edit and filter the content once it's on my machine/infrastructure, and not pay attention to the nonsense you send.
  - derekp7 7y ago
    Personally I would like an ad blocker that only blocks annoying ads, or ads that contain malware. I would also be willing to pay a monthly subscription for an adblock service, where the subscription gets divvied out to the sites I visit. In fact, I can think of how this could work on a large scale. A site can sign up to the adblock service to receive a prorated portion of revenues that individual subscribers pay in, and subscribers have a browser button where they can rate the site (thumbs up, neutral, or thumbs down) for usefulness. That rating can then be fed into a trainer for a search engine so that search results are tuned to that user's preferences (along with a user profile that gets automatically built up, or that a user can adjust themselves). For extra bonus points, the user can get a 10% discount on the service for agreeing to allow the adblock service to monetize that data (and agreeing to their data sharing policy) -- otherwise that data is used only to influence search results. BTW, for years I didn't bother with an ad blocker until I started getting repeatedly hit with malware served up by the ad networks. For that same reason I don't bother with an ad blocker on my phone, because so far I haven't gotten hit with ad-delivered malware on my phone or tablet yet.
    - amphibian87 7y ago
      ad nauseum Firefox clicks ads already, to pay the person advertising. and you never see them. it's great in mobile too
- DevKoala 7y ago
  I agree. If you are using their platform, then you have to abide to their terms of use. I don't use Facebook for this reason.
  - glofish 7y ago
    What if the company does not make it clear what the terms of use are - wich covers pretty much 99.99% of face book users. They trick you - you trick-em back.
  - commoner 7y ago
    Not using Facebook is the best way to avoid Facebook ads, but Facebook's terms of service don't forbid ad blocking. https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms
    - Jamwinner 7y ago
      Ads are the most benign thing FB does. If that was the only issue, nobody would care.
- dannyr 7y ago
  I dislike Facebook but using it means you should agree with how they monetize their business.
  - FussyZeus 7y ago
    The network effects of sites like Facebook, YouTube, Google, and Twitter oftentimes mean taking the ethical stance and "not being part of it" can create serious harm to your business/career/vocation. There's a reason Instagram Influencer and YouTuber are, despite the sniggering of many people, real jobs that earn tons of money for those skilled in plying the craft.
    - dannyr 7y ago
      True. I'm currently in the Philippines and a lot of businesses don't have their own web sites and just have Facebook and Instagram pages. I just browse Facebook without logging in but it has a huge dialog asking me to log in. Of course there are exceptions to the rule but most people are not IG Influencers and Youtubers so opting out of these social media services are not as painful.
      - godzillabrennus 7y ago
        Gotta love pinoy marketing. Treats. Not just a class of food but a brand for gas stations to sell food.
    - grogenaut 7y ago
      You can pretty easily use any of these sites in a professional only capacity.
      - FussyZeus 7y ago
        But you're still using them, and by virtue of using them are increasing their engagement numbers, which is what they want. The only winning move is not to play. But they've created an environment where you pretty much have to.
- tjpnz 7y ago
  I have issues with Facebook and do everything I can to limit my interaction with the platform, but for some situations it's unavoidable - RSVPs to events where there is no alternative, some things relating to births/deaths or marriages, close family members who I've failed to coax off their messaging platform all come to mind. In those situations I'm not going to compromise my own security or privacy.
  - grogenaut 7y ago
    You can only rsvp over facebook, not via text, email, phone, in person, etc? I've never found there to be no alternative. Hell for most events unless the outlay to throw it was extensive you can just show up, I've never actually had an issue with this, and if they actually want you to show they'll call YOU.
    - Jamwinner 7y ago
      Its amazing when you find out who are actually your friends, and who just likes you at their parties, or associated with their event.
- crispinb 7y ago
  There's some justice to that argument for access to strictly discretionary sites, but Facebook has been so 'successful' that it's now approaching monopolistic power, & is something close to required infrastructure. There are an increasing number of online contacts which literally offer no alternative. I have a few fake facebook accounts I'll use where I literally have no alternative, none of which have real data associated with them. I personally have a 100% no-corporate-propaganda rule. No logos on anything where avoidable, no ads allowed on my network, etc. If ads slip through ad blockers & I notice an ad somewhere I place the advertised product or company on a 'never buy' list. No-one other than Facebook has any benefit to gain by forcing ads on me, and frankly in the very unlikely circumstance that people do manage to damage Facebook by circumventing its propaganda platform, so much the better. I'd very much like to see it driven out of business (wild fantasy, I know).
  - grogenaut 7y ago
    Can you give some specific examples of places with no contact alternatives? Not really grokking this point. Do you mean they (the business) can't be contacted any other way, and facebook is their only presence?
    - crispinb 7y ago
      Not if specific means linking to FB! But, yes, there are many local businesses (notably pubs, cafes & some specialty stores) whose only online presence is there. Also some noncommercial stuff - eg in recent bush fires where I live, a local FB group was sometimes the most up to date, if not always the most accurate, source of information. Bizarrely, some XR events are also only publicised on FB.
    - jameshilliard 7y ago
      Look at the developing world where services like internet.org/free basics exist, there are effectively no realistic alternatives for many people.
- notafraudster 7y ago
  "do everything they can to monetize" Except, evidently, allow users to pay money to not be subjected to ads.
  - rabidrat 7y ago
    This is a really good observation. What if we required all ad-based services to make available an equivalent premium offering that showed no ads? I think 99% of people would be stunned at the necessary price and would not pay it anyway, but at least it would be quantified.
    - grogenaut 7y ago
      not sure this is true. Twitch has Ad Free Turbo, it's about $15/month. Youtube had Red, similar price. Both have customers. The real issue is that with google or FB I don't know that I'm not still being sold all over the place. I only know with Twitch because I work there. Also Youtube has been ratcheting up the ads like crazy lately, and I'm very sure red isn't worth it for me personally.
      - rvnx 7y ago
        Well you know, your data is not directly sold. Your data with Google just as part of targeting campaigns ("User is high spender in Google") or equivalent in DoubleClick and Twitch/Amazon is on its way. If you prefer, we don't give to someone the info that IP A.B.C.D but we sell the possibility to target IP A.B.C.D with an ad. It's not "selling" data, but still monetizing it.
    - beefield 7y ago
      This is one of the more important regulations big tech should be subjected to in my opinion. Let me pay for the services I use, with believable guarantees that my data is not used or sold in any way by the service provider. And regulate the cost to be a reasonable margin over production costs of these services. Hosting my hosting my posts and photos should not be that expensive.
- ksangeelee 7y ago
  The web has, since the very beginning I think, had the notion of public and private resources, where access to private resources requires authentication. I view facebook as an almost entirely private resource, protected by a user name, password, and terms of use. So, they can do what they want within the law, so far as I care. I only get annoyed when people engage in hostile behaviour on the public internet - resources that we're meant to freely read, share links to, or index, or process in whatever way we choose. As far as I can tell, facebook do quite a good job of keeping their walled garden well controlled and secure. I barely see anything of their website, but others are willing to jump through hoops just to be in there (e.g. sending in copies of passports). You know, these people will put up with quite a lot of abuse.
- Lio 7y ago
  I don’t blame Facebook for trying insist you see ads. I do blame them for dirty dark patterns like blocking copy and paste in calendar events so that you can’t copy them to an external service.
- Yhippa 7y ago
  I think they should provide an option to perhaps pay them directly to opt-out of ads. If you choose not to pay but still use their service for free then they must do what they must to monetize.
shmerl 7y ago
Sounds like if CSS could allow matching by patterns, it could still block it out? I.e. something regex / wildcard like? Though performance probably would suffer. More advanced ad blocker can probably use some AI, that could be trained with user's hints about what is an ad. Or it can use some OCR for that purpose. If you can recognize that it's labeled "Sponsored", so can ad blocker potentially.
- oferzelig 7y ago
  It's tricky even for Javascript.
  - jameshilliard 7y ago
    Not really, you just need a recursive filtering algorithm such as this: https://github.com/tiratatp/facebook_adblock/blob/master/src/main.js https://github.com/tiratatp/facebook_adblock/blob/master/src...
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
fruffy 7y ago
I always wonder about the person that is responsible for designing these kind of schemes. What is their daily job like? What are they thinking about their work? It might even be fun because you are essentially competing against ad-blockers in cleverness.
- iamkroot 7y ago
  It definitely sounds fun to me. You're engaged in a very game like experience and getting paid for it.
- paggle 7y ago
  It’s like being a poker player, but you probably get paid more.
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    At least poker doesn't have a negative effect on society, given you're only playing against people who opt-in by playing the game. This in comparison is fighting against people who just want a bit of peace and less sewage being dumped in their Facebook timeline.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - atemerev 7y ago
      Being on Facebook is opt-in. I do use FB Messenger for talking to relatives, but that's about all.
      - Nextgrid 7y ago
        It’s not opt-in when the cancer has contaminated a significant chunk of the web with like buttons and other stalking scripts and when the majority of the world is using it as its preferred communication platform, meaning opting out is inconvenient.
jameshilliard 7y ago
It's actually pretty simple to block with a recursive filtering algorithm like this: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/compare/master...jameshilliard:has-visible-text https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/compare/master...jameshill... or https://github.com/tiratatp/facebook_adblock/blob/master/src/main.js https://github.com/tiratatp/facebook_adblock/blob/master/src... which was roughly based off of my rejected uBlock implementation. Funny enough I haven't even used facebook in years for the most part, I wrote one of those just to try and make them lose money as I believe I'm doing a public service by slowing their expansion/world domination plans.
- steve19 7y ago
  Can you explain what the rules to block that actually look like from a user perspective? Or does it require custom js?
  - jameshilliard 7y ago
    Well with the uBlock filter I wrote it looked something like this at the time. facebook.com,facebookcorewwwi.onion##div[id^="hyperfeed_story_id_"]:has(div[id^="feed_sub_title_"]:has-visible-text(Sponsored))
iamkroot 7y ago
I continue to be surprised at how few people have heard of fbpurity[1], a fantastic browser extension that blocks all Facebook ads and lets you filter out specific types of content (links, memories, etc.). It's dramatically improved my Facebook experience; I now see exactly the type of content that I want to see (updates on friend's lives) and nothing more. [1] https://www.fbpurity.com/ https://www.fbpurity.com/
- thatswrong0 7y ago
  I mean one look at the website kind of tells you why. The extension could be a lot less intrusive as well - just compare it to uBlock Origin for example. There doesn't need to be an onboarding message. I don't need to see "F.B. Purity hid:" prominently in the middle of my feed - just put that at the bottom right of the screen in gray text or in the extension. Etc. I'm probably going to uninstall it because it makes FB even uglier.
  - jameshilliard 7y ago
    Give this a try. Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ad-blocker-for-facebook/kinpgphmiekapnpbmobneleaiemkefag https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ad-blocker-for-fac... Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fb_ad_block/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fb_ad_block/
  - King-Aaron 7y ago
    > I mean one look at the website kind of tells you why. Yep, that's horrific. I'd immediately back out of that if I landed on the page.
  - wtmt 7y ago
    You could check out Social Fixer. [1] It's been around for several years, is free and offers many features. The creator/maintainer of Social Fixer was also interviewed in Ars Technica. [1]: https://socialfixer.com/index.html https://socialfixer.com/index.html
    - 7y ago
paggle 7y ago
I cannot understand the people who believe it’s their absolute right to use an ad blocker (a position I agree with) but then don’t believe it’s the site’s absolute right to decide whether or not they will serve you content.
- LukeWalsh 7y ago
  There seems to be a blackjack analogy here. Don’t let the boss catch on!
stiray 7y ago
How I am avoiding Facebook. Took their ASN, scraped ripe (https://stat.ripe.net/widget/routing-history#w.resource=AS32934&w.starttime=2017-01-15T00%3A00%3A00&w.endtime=2017-06-23T00%3A00%3A00&show=Maxmized https://stat.ripe.net/widget/routing-history#w.resource=AS32...) and dynamically updating firewall rules to block them for my whole network. And I am so sorry google is having cloud "hosting" (AS15562) as I would love to do the same for them.
psykus 7y ago
Don't they host their own ads? Something I wish more websites would do instead of letting ad networks stomp all over the page with whatever Javascript/Flash/viruses they want.
- commoner 7y ago
  It's not surprising that Facebook serves its own ads, considering that it's one of the top 2 digital ad networks by revenue in the US. Google does the same for its sites. Facebook and Google have a duopoly on the online ad market, with a combined 60.9% market share. Amazon is #3 with just 7.6%. https://www.emarketer.com/content/facebook-google-duopoly-won-t-crack-this-year https://www.emarketer.com/content/facebook-google-duopoly-wo...
veselin 7y ago
Yes. This is horrible behavior from Facebook. I had a similar problem finding a working extension that blocks fbclk id. Well, I found one, but I am not sure I would want to share it, because the facebook engineering team may go after it as well. This also renders nil the argument about "don't use the product if you don't like their (ad) practices". Tracking across websites without consent is illegal in most of Europe, yet they do it extensively.
- edf13 7y ago
  Devils Advocate... why is it horrible behaviour from Facebook? It's their product which needs to be paid for by Ads and they need to prevent Ad Blockers from stopping these from being served. So in their defence - any technical work around is fair on their part.
  - veselin 7y ago
    Nobody forbids them to put ads. However, there are laws (not even talking moral here). If you explicitly download a tracking blocking extension, you want to opt out of tracking, which is required by law that they provide. What I am saying is that not only they track you, but they explicitly break the top extensions that fix this. From this point of view, I have no regret for any of their ads being blocked.
jk27277 7y ago
https://socialfixer.com https://socialfixer.com But is not as good anymore as it used to be
craigds 7y ago
I wrote a greasemonkey script that runs every 250ms and blocks these. It might be hard with CSS but it's (almost) trivial with a spot of JS
gorpovitch 7y ago
I have a much better experience of Facebook since a few weeks by adding #stream_pagelet{ display: None } in Stylus for the homepage. No news feed. No passive content consumption. Still got pages, events, groups, messages etc. Can still use the website in an active/socializing way (looking for specific things, seeing relevant friends' notifications and invitations) but without being caught by the feed each time I come to check my notifications. Think I'll do the same with pretty much every social network. Content feeds are the worst.
hirako2000 7y ago
I've put down the steps to kill all the junk out. “Customize your Facebook Experience” by Hirako2000 https://link.medium.com/6q6LZgGV61 https://link.medium.com/6q6LZgGV61
1propionyl 7y ago
I'm surprised I haven't seen a single comment say what ought to be the obvious: the easiest way to never see Facebook ads is to just not use Facebook. I should hope I'm preaching to the choir, I'm sure, but... quitting really isn't as hard as you tell yourself it is. It's not as essential as you think it is.
- abhiminator 7y ago
  Cannot agree more. Quit Facebook and its sister service completely (talking about WhatsApp; never really got around to using Instagram) after the 'View As' feature exploit last year that led to 50 mil user accounts' data being exposed [0], and I must say, I've never felt more calmer, tranquil or better, mental health wise. I feel our brains could do much better with a little less of constant bombardment of highlight-reel version of other people's lives. The psychological literature on the negative impacts of social media usage is only ballooning by the day, and there's never been a better time to quit Facebook. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/technology/facebook-hack-data-breach.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/technology/facebook-hack-...
  - npsomaratna 7y ago
    Amen to this. I stopped using Facebook due to the same reason. If anything, my quality of life has gone up since then.
  - tsimionescu 7y ago
    Quitting Facebook itself would help with what you are saying, but I am curious what you replaced WhatsApp/Messenger with. For example, I have good friends in other countries, and sending pictures and short texts is one of the best ways to stay in contact. We do talk over the phone occasionally, but not having a simple way to send pictures or links would pull us much further apart. Sure, email could be an option, but WhatsApp is just so much more convenient.
    - amphibian87 7y ago
      discord is really advanced Iove it you can do group video chat
tiku 7y ago
Why can't AI solve this problem for us. It should be fairly simple now to make a bot "read" words just like us instead of using CSS/HTML/JS to block ads.
charliesome 7y ago
How does this impact assistive technologies? Are Facebook users using screen readers left unaware of what's an ad and what's not?
- digitalengineer 7y ago
  Interesting question! FaceBook Alt Text feature is an after thought at best, so I imagine they never thought about it.
- jmkni 7y ago
  Maybe they detect screen readers via the user agent or something and serve up a more accessible version?
zupreme 7y ago
Current tech available is already well beyond this, but simply needs to be properly applied. Facebook Ads look like ads, by design. Shift gears to IMAGE RECOGNITION and success will follow.
babuskov 7y ago
I actually don't mind Facebook ads. If I'm on Facebook already, there's no additional javascript loading and hogging my browser with dozens of megabytes of tracking scripts. From performance point of view, browsing FB is a better experience than your average web site these days.
- black_puppydog 7y ago
  I do mind. And I specifically mind the amount of engineering they put into making sure you can't not see them. It's not like you can really opt to not use facebook in one way or another, if you have an account with them or not.
- commoner 7y ago
  Ads don't just slow down the browser, they also distract users and waste their time. The vast majority of people who use ad blockers don't want to see any ads at all. Facebook also tracks a variety of metrics related to their ads, and the data collection is implemented through JavaScript or other methods of triggering web requests. These methods do impact performance. https://www.facebook.com/business/help/735720159834389 https://www.facebook.com/business/help/735720159834389 https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/facebook-confirms-that-it-tracks-how-you-move-mouse-on-the-computer-screen-1258189-2018-06-12 https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/facebook-con...
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
  To be fair the ads tend to be better than the mountain of shit that my elderly relatives share on there. Then again I very, very rarely visit the site in the first place.
mesarvagya 7y ago
Or you can use Pi-hole and remove any and all ads :)
- dest 7y ago
  Uh, no. Pi-hole is a DNS-based ad blocker, while the ads we are talking about are served by first party.
  - lordgrenville 7y ago
    Yes, and for the same reason YouTube ads will slip through Pi-Hole (at least without some customisation).
  - Jamwinner 7y ago
    Just block all of facebook and their CDNs. Problem solved. Sure, that also kills facebook access, so two birds with one stone!
jedberg 7y ago
What really makes me sad is that some presumably quite talented engineer spent time thinking this up and coding it.
- tomd3v 7y ago
  Can you explain what is wrong with engineers working on problems like these? As I see this, it allows businesses to connect with more people, therefore being more profitable, therefore making economy grow in general. I just don't understand this hate towards developers who work for companies like FB and Google and whose job is focusing on increasing ad engagement. In my opinion, they definitely provide a hugely positive effect on economy (unless you think capitalism / consumerism is evil / wrong or whatever, which is another topic).
  - michaelt 7y ago
    When I visit https://www.facebook.com/careers/ https://www.facebook.com/careers/ the first things it says are "Do the Most Meaningful Work of Your Career, [...] We design products and deliver services that bring the world closer together - one connection at a time [...] We encourage our people to be bold and solve the problems they care most about. [...] Together, we help others build stronger communities" Does working on anti-ad-blocking seem like that to you? To me, if I was promised "the most meaningful work of my career" then I was assigned to anti-ad-blocking I wouldn't feel my Facebook career was delivering on that promise.
    - rndgermandude 7y ago
      Yeah, that sounds a bit like being promised a research job in curing cancer, but then being put on a team that researches how to weaponize ebola for that customer in North Korea...
    - tomd3v 7y ago
      That wasn't my point. And actually I am not sure what are you trying to say with your reply cause it's not related to what I was saying. My point was that those engineers working on those problems have a good impact on economy as a whole. Efficient engaging ads are great for everyone, it's great for growth. > To me, if I was promised "the most meaningful work of my career" then I was assigned to anti-ad-blocking I wouldn't feel my Facebook career was delivering on that promise. Then you could easily just quit.
sub7 7y ago
Someone should write this: an blocker that uploads a screenshot of the page, use OCR to find 'Sponsored' and send back coordinates of the box that can then be painted over client side. Obviously OCR is one of many strategies and as long you kept the code for these adblock strategies open source, it would work on all visual ads. Train an AI with a billion screenshots of pages with ads marked out. It should be able to handle 90+% of ads easy.
jesperlang 7y ago
The main news feed is such a toxic space anyway so I just blocked it in general with this uBlock filter: www.facebook.com##div[id^="feed_stream_"] > div
aaron695 7y ago
I assume this problem is the same reason why accessibility programs suck? Given the billions that could be saved by making programs that interpret web sites rather than programmers learning and writing for accessibility I'd hope it's because it's impossibly hard, not because no one will create it. I'd also help with testing......
gorgoiler 7y ago
Relatedly, uBlock Origin’s picker has really improved my quality of life on Facebook. I love Facebook, it’s my only remaining connection to some people, and it’s revived many friendships I thought I’d lost. However, as one gets on in life, People You May Know can be extremely emotionally impactful. It is a little part of the web UI that brings back the dead, ex partners I still miss, exes who have moved on, and toxic people I had tried to move on from. It’s really put me through the wringer and being able to block that part of the UI forever is something I’m very glad Facebook, in the role I have gladly given it as being an overseer of my (mostly good) emotions, does not and shouldn’t ever stop me from doing. I hope they realize this.
- markosaric 7y ago
  I love that feature. Use it for all the different things that I don't like to see, that distract me etc. Some of the "annoyances" filters are great too to remove most of those cookie notices and other stuff. They're not on by default but easy to switch on in the uBlock origin settings.
- fortydegrees 7y ago
  Your last paragraph is really difficult to parse. I originally thought you liked the feature because it put you through the emotional wringer (in terms of making you work through certain negative emotions), and that it wasn't coddling you.
  - gorgoiler 7y ago
    Thanks for the feedback. I find writing to be very difficult. It’s really helpful to me when people take the time to point out where I’m not clear, especially when it’s constructive feedback, like yours is.
    - nilkn 7y ago
      For what it's worth, I thought your meaning was clear. Your third paragraph opens with "however," indicating a contrast to the previous one (in which your love for FB is stated). So I interpreted "emotionally impactful" in a negative rather than positive sense. As a result I didn't have any issues with your last paragraph.
blauditore 7y ago
span[data-content="S"] + span[data-content="p"] + span[data-content="o"] + span[data-content="n"] + span[data-content="s"] + span[data-content="o"] + span[data-content="r"] + span[data-content="e"] + span[data-content="d"] { display: none; } This only hides the "d", right? You generally can't hide a higher-level element based on drill-down selectors, so pure CSS wouldn't be enough. But of course, finding the appropriate parent by scripting would be trivial from here. Apart of that, why can't one just accumulate all visible text by filtering out all `display: none` elements? Of course, this could be attacked again by e.g. shrinking the "noise" characters to width 0.
- byuu 7y ago
  Yeah, I always have to write userscripts to get access to getElementsBy(TagName,Id,etc) and then call .parentNode().parentNode()... to reach the ancestor I want to remove. Of course the downside of userscripts compared to uBlock rules is that they take time to run, so you end up seeing the ads briefly before they are erased, which is annoying. So then I run the scripts prior to page-load to insert CSS rules to hide all elements that might be ads, let the page load, filter it, and then override the older CSS rules. It's quite a hassle, really. What I'm saying is, :parent selectors in CSS would be greatly appreciated.
a_imho 7y ago
How the narrative that content blockers are a non threat has fallen.
rustybolt 7y ago
Nice breakdown. If I open facebook I can see the 'sponsored' as plain text right there in the developer tools... It might make a difference that I'm using chrome in Dutch?
jakub_g 7y ago
For more crazy adblocker avoidance solutions found in the wild, check this presentation from JSConfEU 2019 from an ABP employee: https://2019.jsconf.eu/shwetank-dixit/block-unblock-block-how-ad-blockers-are-being-circumvented-and-how-they-are-fighting-back.html https://2019.jsconf.eu/shwetank-dixit/block-unblock-block-ho... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vk9bPDaZELQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vk9bPDaZELQ
yccheok 7y ago
Don't let Facebook get away with this!
maury91 7y ago
I wrote a similar article some time ago with a look at how to detect them and remove them from the DOM. It was mostly for didactic reasons. https://medium.com/hackernoon/how-i-get-rid-of-the-new-sponsored-facebook-posts-138d013f4bbe https://medium.com/hackernoon/how-i-get-rid-of-the-new-spons... but my approach was to use Javascript instead of CSS
Cougher 7y ago
Commenting about some of the comments . . . Yes, ads are what keeps facebook and other websites running, but there's a blurred line that crosses from offering content for users to offering users as product. To attract readers, they provide content that has value. Then they do everything in their power to distract you from what you came for. When the distraction is too overpowering and irritating many people will complain and leave. It doesn't necessarily mean that we don't understand the money model; it's that we obviously are not going on the internet to see ads that take primacy over our online experience. The line may be blurred, but facebook users are not facebook's customers; they are the product. Facebook offers this product to the businesses that pay for access. Inasmuch as facebook focuses on an engaging user experience, it's only to ensure that they maintain their product so businesses keep buying it. It's interesting how this product maintenance has evolved: like news or reality shows or contest shows, the aim is to introduce tension, and in the case of news topics, anger, which oddly keeps people coming back for more. The aim of providing an engaging user experience has morphed into providing an addictive user experience. And like most addictions, what started out as an enjoyable pleasure transforms into something that controls and destroys us to varying degrees.
- dhimes 7y ago
  I don't mind ads. I revolt against tracking.
joestr 7y ago
Question for anyone in the know: Is this allowed, from an accessibility point of view? I'm just wondering how someone with a screen reader would know it's an ad? (Or are screenreaders more advanced than I think, and would actually be able to read out 'sponsored')?
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  AFAIK it's not about the screenreader, but about the browser. The browser knows these aren't visible, so I don't expect it would have any reason to report them to the accessibility interface (IAccessible et al.).
kalado 7y ago
Not only the ads. I once recreate the feed for a university project. Just take a look at the sources. Every element is completely obscured, every class and id is just long random strings.
goatinaboat 7y ago
To me this is very simple, if someone installs an ad or tracking blocker then they are explicitly withdrawing consent, there is absolutely no ambiguity about it. Doing it anyway or de-anonymising them or anything else is impossible to do without equally explicitly knowing that you are violating consent. And every Facebook employee must know it.
- clarkenheim 7y ago
  You gave consent to see ads when you signed up. Why would the presence of an ad blocker withdraw that consent?
  - goatinaboat 7y ago
    Because GDPR states that consent can be withdrawn at any time, and that provision of services can not be tied to consent. That’s the law here in Wales.
    - madisfun 7y ago
      GDPR requires consent for the processing of the personal data. Displaying an ad per se is not regulated by GDPR, and does not require consent. Though personalization of this advertisement requires processing of the PII, and thus it is supposed to be regulated. Facebook UI is full of dark patterns, but it is possible to withdraw consent through settings: www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/
vector_spaces 7y ago
I have seen a similar technique used to build paywalls for research papers that display obfuscated "previews" of the article you clicked on beneath the "pay for access" banner
elierotenberg 7y ago
It reminds me of a lightning talk I gave at ReactConf some time ago :) Basically forward-shuffling the component tree to produce HTML that will be really hard to match using CSS Selectors usually found in adblockers and other DOM-targeting scripts. Code: https://github.com/elierotenberg/react-armor https://github.com/elierotenberg/react-armor Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n63XXHY4A7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n63XXHY4A7I
wayneftw 7y ago
What happens when screen readers can't identify things properly? Can Facebook be sued for not providing proper accessibility, given that their site is deemed to be essential by many? If screen readers can identify something as an advertisement, then so should ad blockers be able to. If not... then aren't we depriving the blind and the sight challenged from valuable advertising equality?
- jaywalk 7y ago
  I think you're kind of misunderstanding how screen readers work. You're clearly seeing the "Sponsored" text on the screen, and so is the screen reader. It's not that the text isn't there, it's just that it's put there in a way that is nearly impossible to target with CSS-based ad blocking. That's all.
  - aguyfromnb 7y ago
    >It's not that the text isn't there, it's just that it's put there in a way that is nearly impossible to target with CSS-based ad blocking. I'm confused too, then. If the screen-reader can see the word "sponsored" easily, why can't any other code? What is the difference between how a screen reader finds "sponsored" vs an ad-blocker?
    - jaywalk 7y ago
      A screen reader is looking at the text as it is rendered. Note that I said CSS-based ad blocking, which is really what the blog post was about. A more advanced ad blocker could certainly find the "Sponsored" text and hide the ad.
cowbird 7y ago
A year ago, I was on Facebook constantly. At one point, I realized that I could do better things with the time wasted there so I installed News Feed Eradicator (I learned about it in a podcast. I think a Peter Attia podcast, but I could be wrong). Anyway, now Facebook is alien to me. I still have it on my laptop, and if I need to search something of for someone,I can use Facebook. But I don't have access to scrolling. I don't have a wall anymore. lol. I don't have the app on my phone though. I feel super.
asow92 7y ago
just stop using facebook. no more ads.
turc1656 7y ago
I don't use Facebook, but I imagine the easiest way of blocking the ads is like most other websites - to block the connection to the ad-server(s), no? That's how uMatrix operates and, in my opinion, that works exceptionally well. It blocks known domains that are ad-servers and that alone blocks damn near everything because of the way ads are served on nearly every single website. In fact it works so well that pretty much the only time I've noticed ads has been when I look at uMatrix and I see there aren't direct user connections to the ad servers. For those pages, it looks like the site itself is acting as a middle man and pulling the ads and inserting into the HTML via scripting. But that's a lot more work for developers to do, as well as more bandwidth and overhead. I don't know if those sites are able to tailor ads to individual users when they do this - they would need some sort of identification to pass to the ad server so the ads on those sites might be generic, not sure. But that's my observation, FWIW.
Tracykelvin 7y ago
Thanks to [[[Robinsonbuckler @yahoo .com]]] because he brought back my Ex husband. my husband left me for his ex girlfriend he had before he married me it’s a difficult situation for me I called and beg him to come back he refused he said he don’t love me anymore I tried every possible way to get him back all was in vain I told my friend about it and she gave me Robinson buckler email and I emailed him and told him my problem and he told me what to do and I did it and he cast a love spell which brought back my husband within 24 hours…………

395 points by ganderzz 7y ago

Interesting article. I don't blame Facebook for doing whatever they can to properly show ads tho, they provide a "free" service and in exchange serve ads. It's not free to support a company their size and its expected they do everything they can to monetize the site properly. What do you guys think?

oferzelig 7y ago
So you're basically against ad blockers.
- dannyr 7y ago
  If a business chooses how they make money to survive, can you just say "I don't like how you make money so I'll just get everything for free"? If you don't like how a company uses ads (regular, spammy, deceptive), no better way than tell them than by not giving them any traffic at all.
  - baroffoos 7y ago
    Users are allowed to control how they view content on their own computer. Facebook has chosen to give the content out for free and users may choose to render the content however they wish. Facebook is free to charge for the service.
    - dannyr 7y ago
      "Facebook has chosen to give the content out for free". No, it's not free. Facebook makes money off data from its users.
      - baroffoos 7y ago
        The "free" in this case is the fact that they have not charged any fee to obtain the data.
      - dannyr 7y ago
        Let me paraphrase your statement then ""Facebook has chosen to give the content out for free BY SERVING ADS".
        baroffoos 7y ago
        And the user is in no way obligated to look at the ads. If I start a business giving away things for free expecting the users to pay me back later but in no way requiring them to and it doesn't work out then thats just a bad business model.
  - ACow_Adonis 7y ago
    The internet/web is USED by businesses. The internet/web is not FOR businesses. Perhaps that's the fundamental difference in perspective about who's responsibility it is to make allowances for who serves/receives content...
  - rdiddly 7y ago
    In this case, yes, yes you can. Although note that the value flows in the other direction. We're getting Facebook content (worthless), they're getting our attention (valuable).
- squeaky-clean 7y ago
  You can be in favor of both sides of this argument, I would say I am. I believe in my right to modify what's running on my computer and network, including things like installing adblocker extensions and pi-hole and so on. But I also believe that no organization is obligated to serve their data to me in a way that makes it easy to block those ads. They are wasting CPU hours and man hours on obfuscation features rather than real value to the end user. But nothing is really wrong with that, it's just a bit silly. If they think it makes them more profit overall than actually enhancing Facebook, they can take that bet. (I think it's the wrong bet, but they can still take it)
  - ACow_Adonis 7y ago
    That's basically my attitude too, and I'd consider myself one of the more pro-adblocker advocates. I see the internet as a bunch of servers talking to each other. Some make requests to others, some respond to those requests by sending content. You can block me, you can choose to not send or respond data to my requests, and you can send your website/content in some form that's better suited to Perl golf or the obfuscated C contest. That's your prerogative. On my end, I get to decide who I send my requests to, how I spend my time and attention, and what I do on my machine with incoming requests and data. Make your site bad enough, and I (and others) will stop going, and eventually you'll likely sow the seeds of your own destruction (as people move away and create competition), but fundamentally that's your call to make. Just like its mine to ignore you or your requests that I talk to your affiliated servers, edit and filter the content once it's on my machine/infrastructure, and not pay attention to the nonsense you send.
- derekp7 7y ago
  Personally I would like an ad blocker that only blocks annoying ads, or ads that contain malware. I would also be willing to pay a monthly subscription for an adblock service, where the subscription gets divvied out to the sites I visit. In fact, I can think of how this could work on a large scale. A site can sign up to the adblock service to receive a prorated portion of revenues that individual subscribers pay in, and subscribers have a browser button where they can rate the site (thumbs up, neutral, or thumbs down) for usefulness. That rating can then be fed into a trainer for a search engine so that search results are tuned to that user's preferences (along with a user profile that gets automatically built up, or that a user can adjust themselves). For extra bonus points, the user can get a 10% discount on the service for agreeing to allow the adblock service to monetize that data (and agreeing to their data sharing policy) -- otherwise that data is used only to influence search results. BTW, for years I didn't bother with an ad blocker until I started getting repeatedly hit with malware served up by the ad networks. For that same reason I don't bother with an ad blocker on my phone, because so far I haven't gotten hit with ad-delivered malware on my phone or tablet yet.
  - amphibian87 7y ago
    ad nauseum Firefox clicks ads already, to pay the person advertising. and you never see them. it's great in mobile too
DevKoala 7y ago
I agree. If you are using their platform, then you have to abide to their terms of use. I don't use Facebook for this reason.
- glofish 7y ago
  What if the company does not make it clear what the terms of use are - wich covers pretty much 99.99% of face book users. They trick you - you trick-em back.
- commoner 7y ago
  Not using Facebook is the best way to avoid Facebook ads, but Facebook's terms of service don't forbid ad blocking. https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms
  - Jamwinner 7y ago
    Ads are the most benign thing FB does. If that was the only issue, nobody would care.
dannyr 7y ago
I dislike Facebook but using it means you should agree with how they monetize their business.
- FussyZeus 7y ago
  The network effects of sites like Facebook, YouTube, Google, and Twitter oftentimes mean taking the ethical stance and "not being part of it" can create serious harm to your business/career/vocation. There's a reason Instagram Influencer and YouTuber are, despite the sniggering of many people, real jobs that earn tons of money for those skilled in plying the craft.
  - dannyr 7y ago
    True. I'm currently in the Philippines and a lot of businesses don't have their own web sites and just have Facebook and Instagram pages. I just browse Facebook without logging in but it has a huge dialog asking me to log in. Of course there are exceptions to the rule but most people are not IG Influencers and Youtubers so opting out of these social media services are not as painful.
    - godzillabrennus 7y ago
      Gotta love pinoy marketing. Treats. Not just a class of food but a brand for gas stations to sell food.
  - grogenaut 7y ago
    You can pretty easily use any of these sites in a professional only capacity.
    - FussyZeus 7y ago
      But you're still using them, and by virtue of using them are increasing their engagement numbers, which is what they want. The only winning move is not to play. But they've created an environment where you pretty much have to.
tjpnz 7y ago
I have issues with Facebook and do everything I can to limit my interaction with the platform, but for some situations it's unavoidable - RSVPs to events where there is no alternative, some things relating to births/deaths or marriages, close family members who I've failed to coax off their messaging platform all come to mind. In those situations I'm not going to compromise my own security or privacy.
- grogenaut 7y ago
  You can only rsvp over facebook, not via text, email, phone, in person, etc? I've never found there to be no alternative. Hell for most events unless the outlay to throw it was extensive you can just show up, I've never actually had an issue with this, and if they actually want you to show they'll call YOU.
  - Jamwinner 7y ago
    Its amazing when you find out who are actually your friends, and who just likes you at their parties, or associated with their event.
crispinb 7y ago
There's some justice to that argument for access to strictly discretionary sites, but Facebook has been so 'successful' that it's now approaching monopolistic power, & is something close to required infrastructure. There are an increasing number of online contacts which literally offer no alternative. I have a few fake facebook accounts I'll use where I literally have no alternative, none of which have real data associated with them. I personally have a 100% no-corporate-propaganda rule. No logos on anything where avoidable, no ads allowed on my network, etc. If ads slip through ad blockers & I notice an ad somewhere I place the advertised product or company on a 'never buy' list. No-one other than Facebook has any benefit to gain by forcing ads on me, and frankly in the very unlikely circumstance that people do manage to damage Facebook by circumventing its propaganda platform, so much the better. I'd very much like to see it driven out of business (wild fantasy, I know).
- grogenaut 7y ago
  Can you give some specific examples of places with no contact alternatives? Not really grokking this point. Do you mean they (the business) can't be contacted any other way, and facebook is their only presence?
  - crispinb 7y ago
    Not if specific means linking to FB! But, yes, there are many local businesses (notably pubs, cafes & some specialty stores) whose only online presence is there. Also some noncommercial stuff - eg in recent bush fires where I live, a local FB group was sometimes the most up to date, if not always the most accurate, source of information. Bizarrely, some XR events are also only publicised on FB.
  - jameshilliard 7y ago
    Look at the developing world where services like internet.org/free basics exist, there are effectively no realistic alternatives for many people.
notafraudster 7y ago
"do everything they can to monetize" Except, evidently, allow users to pay money to not be subjected to ads.
- rabidrat 7y ago
  This is a really good observation. What if we required all ad-based services to make available an equivalent premium offering that showed no ads? I think 99% of people would be stunned at the necessary price and would not pay it anyway, but at least it would be quantified.
  - grogenaut 7y ago
    not sure this is true. Twitch has Ad Free Turbo, it's about $15/month. Youtube had Red, similar price. Both have customers. The real issue is that with google or FB I don't know that I'm not still being sold all over the place. I only know with Twitch because I work there. Also Youtube has been ratcheting up the ads like crazy lately, and I'm very sure red isn't worth it for me personally.
    - rvnx 7y ago
      Well you know, your data is not directly sold. Your data with Google just as part of targeting campaigns ("User is high spender in Google") or equivalent in DoubleClick and Twitch/Amazon is on its way. If you prefer, we don't give to someone the info that IP A.B.C.D but we sell the possibility to target IP A.B.C.D with an ad. It's not "selling" data, but still monetizing it.
  - beefield 7y ago
    This is one of the more important regulations big tech should be subjected to in my opinion. Let me pay for the services I use, with believable guarantees that my data is not used or sold in any way by the service provider. And regulate the cost to be a reasonable margin over production costs of these services. Hosting my hosting my posts and photos should not be that expensive.
ksangeelee 7y ago
The web has, since the very beginning I think, had the notion of public and private resources, where access to private resources requires authentication. I view facebook as an almost entirely private resource, protected by a user name, password, and terms of use. So, they can do what they want within the law, so far as I care. I only get annoyed when people engage in hostile behaviour on the public internet - resources that we're meant to freely read, share links to, or index, or process in whatever way we choose. As far as I can tell, facebook do quite a good job of keeping their walled garden well controlled and secure. I barely see anything of their website, but others are willing to jump through hoops just to be in there (e.g. sending in copies of passports). You know, these people will put up with quite a lot of abuse.
Lio 7y ago
I don’t blame Facebook for trying insist you see ads. I do blame them for dirty dark patterns like blocking copy and paste in calendar events so that you can’t copy them to an external service.
Yhippa 7y ago
I think they should provide an option to perhaps pay them directly to opt-out of ads. If you choose not to pay but still use their service for free then they must do what they must to monetize.

shmerl 7y ago

Sounds like if CSS could allow matching by patterns, it could still block it out? I.e. something regex / wildcard like? Though performance probably would suffer. More advanced ad blocker can probably use some AI, that could be trained with user's hints about what is an ad. Or it can use some OCR for that purpose. If you can recognize that it's labeled "Sponsored", so can ad blocker potentially.

oferzelig 7y ago
It's tricky even for Javascript.
- jameshilliard 7y ago
  Not really, you just need a recursive filtering algorithm such as this: https://github.com/tiratatp/facebook_adblock/blob/master/src/main.js https://github.com/tiratatp/facebook_adblock/blob/master/src...
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]

fruffy 7y ago

I always wonder about the person that is responsible for designing these kind of schemes. What is their daily job like? What are they thinking about their work? It might even be fun because you are essentially competing against ad-blockers in cleverness.

iamkroot 7y ago
It definitely sounds fun to me. You're engaged in a very game like experience and getting paid for it.
paggle 7y ago
It’s like being a poker player, but you probably get paid more.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  At least poker doesn't have a negative effect on society, given you're only playing against people who opt-in by playing the game. This in comparison is fighting against people who just want a bit of peace and less sewage being dumped in their Facebook timeline.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - atemerev 7y ago
    Being on Facebook is opt-in. I do use FB Messenger for talking to relatives, but that's about all.
    - Nextgrid 7y ago
      It’s not opt-in when the cancer has contaminated a significant chunk of the web with like buttons and other stalking scripts and when the majority of the world is using it as its preferred communication platform, meaning opting out is inconvenient.

jameshilliard 7y ago

It's actually pretty simple to block with a recursive filtering algorithm like this: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/compare/master...jameshilliard:has-visible-text https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/compare/master...jameshill... or https://github.com/tiratatp/facebook_adblock/blob/master/src/main.js https://github.com/tiratatp/facebook_adblock/blob/master/src... which was roughly based off of my rejected uBlock implementation. Funny enough I haven't even used facebook in years for the most part, I wrote one of those just to try and make them lose money as I believe I'm doing a public service by slowing their expansion/world domination plans.

steve19 7y ago
Can you explain what the rules to block that actually look like from a user perspective? Or does it require custom js?
- jameshilliard 7y ago
  Well with the uBlock filter I wrote it looked something like this at the time. facebook.com,facebookcorewwwi.onion##div[id^="hyperfeed_story_id_"]:has(div[id^="feed_sub_title_"]:has-visible-text(Sponsored))

iamkroot 7y ago

I continue to be surprised at how few people have heard of fbpurity[1], a fantastic browser extension that blocks all Facebook ads and lets you filter out specific types of content (links, memories, etc.). It's dramatically improved my Facebook experience; I now see exactly the type of content that I want to see (updates on friend's lives) and nothing more. [1] https://www.fbpurity.com/ https://www.fbpurity.com/

thatswrong0 7y ago
I mean one look at the website kind of tells you why. The extension could be a lot less intrusive as well - just compare it to uBlock Origin for example. There doesn't need to be an onboarding message. I don't need to see "F.B. Purity hid:" prominently in the middle of my feed - just put that at the bottom right of the screen in gray text or in the extension. Etc. I'm probably going to uninstall it because it makes FB even uglier.
- jameshilliard 7y ago
  Give this a try. Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ad-blocker-for-facebook/kinpgphmiekapnpbmobneleaiemkefag https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ad-blocker-for-fac... Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fb_ad_block/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fb_ad_block/
- King-Aaron 7y ago
  > I mean one look at the website kind of tells you why. Yep, that's horrific. I'd immediately back out of that if I landed on the page.
- wtmt 7y ago
  You could check out Social Fixer. [1] It's been around for several years, is free and offers many features. The creator/maintainer of Social Fixer was also interviewed in Ars Technica. [1]: https://socialfixer.com/index.html https://socialfixer.com/index.html
  - 7y ago

paggle 7y ago

I cannot understand the people who believe it’s their absolute right to use an ad blocker (a position I agree with) but then don’t believe it’s the site’s absolute right to decide whether or not they will serve you content.

LukeWalsh 7y ago
There seems to be a blackjack analogy here. Don’t let the boss catch on!

stiray 7y ago

How I am avoiding Facebook. Took their ASN, scraped ripe (https://stat.ripe.net/widget/routing-history#w.resource=AS32934&w.starttime=2017-01-15T00%3A00%3A00&w.endtime=2017-06-23T00%3A00%3A00&show=Maxmized https://stat.ripe.net/widget/routing-history#w.resource=AS32...) and dynamically updating firewall rules to block them for my whole network. And I am so sorry google is having cloud "hosting" (AS15562) as I would love to do the same for them.

psykus 7y ago

Don't they host their own ads? Something I wish more websites would do instead of letting ad networks stomp all over the page with whatever Javascript/Flash/viruses they want.

commoner 7y ago
It's not surprising that Facebook serves its own ads, considering that it's one of the top 2 digital ad networks by revenue in the US. Google does the same for its sites. Facebook and Google have a duopoly on the online ad market, with a combined 60.9% market share. Amazon is #3 with just 7.6%. https://www.emarketer.com/content/facebook-google-duopoly-won-t-crack-this-year https://www.emarketer.com/content/facebook-google-duopoly-wo...

veselin 7y ago

Yes. This is horrible behavior from Facebook. I had a similar problem finding a working extension that blocks fbclk id. Well, I found one, but I am not sure I would want to share it, because the facebook engineering team may go after it as well. This also renders nil the argument about "don't use the product if you don't like their (ad) practices". Tracking across websites without consent is illegal in most of Europe, yet they do it extensively.

edf13 7y ago
Devils Advocate... why is it horrible behaviour from Facebook? It's their product which needs to be paid for by Ads and they need to prevent Ad Blockers from stopping these from being served. So in their defence - any technical work around is fair on their part.
- veselin 7y ago
  Nobody forbids them to put ads. However, there are laws (not even talking moral here). If you explicitly download a tracking blocking extension, you want to opt out of tracking, which is required by law that they provide. What I am saying is that not only they track you, but they explicitly break the top extensions that fix this. From this point of view, I have no regret for any of their ads being blocked.

jk27277 7y ago

https://socialfixer.com https://socialfixer.com But is not as good anymore as it used to be

craigds 7y ago

I wrote a greasemonkey script that runs every 250ms and blocks these. It might be hard with CSS but it's (almost) trivial with a spot of JS

gorpovitch 7y ago

I have a much better experience of Facebook since a few weeks by adding #stream_pagelet{ display: None } in Stylus for the homepage. No news feed. No passive content consumption. Still got pages, events, groups, messages etc. Can still use the website in an active/socializing way (looking for specific things, seeing relevant friends' notifications and invitations) but without being caught by the feed each time I come to check my notifications. Think I'll do the same with pretty much every social network. Content feeds are the worst.

hirako2000 7y ago

I've put down the steps to kill all the junk out. “Customize your Facebook Experience” by Hirako2000 https://link.medium.com/6q6LZgGV61 https://link.medium.com/6q6LZgGV61

1propionyl 7y ago

I'm surprised I haven't seen a single comment say what ought to be the obvious: the easiest way to never see Facebook ads is to just not use Facebook. I should hope I'm preaching to the choir, I'm sure, but... quitting really isn't as hard as you tell yourself it is. It's not as essential as you think it is.

abhiminator 7y ago
Cannot agree more. Quit Facebook and its sister service completely (talking about WhatsApp; never really got around to using Instagram) after the 'View As' feature exploit last year that led to 50 mil user accounts' data being exposed [0], and I must say, I've never felt more calmer, tranquil or better, mental health wise. I feel our brains could do much better with a little less of constant bombardment of highlight-reel version of other people's lives. The psychological literature on the negative impacts of social media usage is only ballooning by the day, and there's never been a better time to quit Facebook. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/technology/facebook-hack-data-breach.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/technology/facebook-hack-...
- npsomaratna 7y ago
  Amen to this. I stopped using Facebook due to the same reason. If anything, my quality of life has gone up since then.
- tsimionescu 7y ago
  Quitting Facebook itself would help with what you are saying, but I am curious what you replaced WhatsApp/Messenger with. For example, I have good friends in other countries, and sending pictures and short texts is one of the best ways to stay in contact. We do talk over the phone occasionally, but not having a simple way to send pictures or links would pull us much further apart. Sure, email could be an option, but WhatsApp is just so much more convenient.
  - amphibian87 7y ago
    discord is really advanced Iove it you can do group video chat

tiku 7y ago

Why can't AI solve this problem for us. It should be fairly simple now to make a bot "read" words just like us instead of using CSS/HTML/JS to block ads.

charliesome 7y ago

How does this impact assistive technologies? Are Facebook users using screen readers left unaware of what's an ad and what's not?

digitalengineer 7y ago
Interesting question! FaceBook Alt Text feature is an after thought at best, so I imagine they never thought about it.
jmkni 7y ago
Maybe they detect screen readers via the user agent or something and serve up a more accessible version?

zupreme 7y ago

Current tech available is already well beyond this, but simply needs to be properly applied. Facebook Ads look like ads, by design. Shift gears to IMAGE RECOGNITION and success will follow.

babuskov 7y ago

I actually don't mind Facebook ads. If I'm on Facebook already, there's no additional javascript loading and hogging my browser with dozens of megabytes of tracking scripts. From performance point of view, browsing FB is a better experience than your average web site these days.

black_puppydog 7y ago
I do mind. And I specifically mind the amount of engineering they put into making sure you can't not see them. It's not like you can really opt to not use facebook in one way or another, if you have an account with them or not.
commoner 7y ago
Ads don't just slow down the browser, they also distract users and waste their time. The vast majority of people who use ad blockers don't want to see any ads at all. Facebook also tracks a variety of metrics related to their ads, and the data collection is implemented through JavaScript or other methods of triggering web requests. These methods do impact performance. https://www.facebook.com/business/help/735720159834389 https://www.facebook.com/business/help/735720159834389 https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/facebook-confirms-that-it-tracks-how-you-move-mouse-on-the-computer-screen-1258189-2018-06-12 https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/facebook-con...
SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
To be fair the ads tend to be better than the mountain of shit that my elderly relatives share on there. Then again I very, very rarely visit the site in the first place.

mesarvagya 7y ago

Or you can use Pi-hole and remove any and all ads :)

dest 7y ago
Uh, no. Pi-hole is a DNS-based ad blocker, while the ads we are talking about are served by first party.
- lordgrenville 7y ago
  Yes, and for the same reason YouTube ads will slip through Pi-Hole (at least without some customisation).
- Jamwinner 7y ago
  Just block all of facebook and their CDNs. Problem solved. Sure, that also kills facebook access, so two birds with one stone!

jedberg 7y ago

What really makes me sad is that some presumably quite talented engineer spent time thinking this up and coding it.

tomd3v 7y ago
Can you explain what is wrong with engineers working on problems like these? As I see this, it allows businesses to connect with more people, therefore being more profitable, therefore making economy grow in general. I just don't understand this hate towards developers who work for companies like FB and Google and whose job is focusing on increasing ad engagement. In my opinion, they definitely provide a hugely positive effect on economy (unless you think capitalism / consumerism is evil / wrong or whatever, which is another topic).
- michaelt 7y ago
  When I visit https://www.facebook.com/careers/ https://www.facebook.com/careers/ the first things it says are "Do the Most Meaningful Work of Your Career, [...] We design products and deliver services that bring the world closer together - one connection at a time [...] We encourage our people to be bold and solve the problems they care most about. [...] Together, we help others build stronger communities" Does working on anti-ad-blocking seem like that to you? To me, if I was promised "the most meaningful work of my career" then I was assigned to anti-ad-blocking I wouldn't feel my Facebook career was delivering on that promise.
  - rndgermandude 7y ago
    Yeah, that sounds a bit like being promised a research job in curing cancer, but then being put on a team that researches how to weaponize ebola for that customer in North Korea...
  - tomd3v 7y ago
    That wasn't my point. And actually I am not sure what are you trying to say with your reply cause it's not related to what I was saying. My point was that those engineers working on those problems have a good impact on economy as a whole. Efficient engaging ads are great for everyone, it's great for growth. > To me, if I was promised "the most meaningful work of my career" then I was assigned to anti-ad-blocking I wouldn't feel my Facebook career was delivering on that promise. Then you could easily just quit.

sub7 7y ago

Someone should write this: an blocker that uploads a screenshot of the page, use OCR to find 'Sponsored' and send back coordinates of the box that can then be painted over client side. Obviously OCR is one of many strategies and as long you kept the code for these adblock strategies open source, it would work on all visual ads. Train an AI with a billion screenshots of pages with ads marked out. It should be able to handle 90+% of ads easy.

jesperlang 7y ago

The main news feed is such a toxic space anyway so I just blocked it in general with this uBlock filter: www.facebook.com##div[id^="feed_stream_"] > div

aaron695 7y ago

I assume this problem is the same reason why accessibility programs suck? Given the billions that could be saved by making programs that interpret web sites rather than programmers learning and writing for accessibility I'd hope it's because it's impossibly hard, not because no one will create it. I'd also help with testing......

gorgoiler 7y ago

Relatedly, uBlock Origin’s picker has really improved my quality of life on Facebook. I love Facebook, it’s my only remaining connection to some people, and it’s revived many friendships I thought I’d lost. However, as one gets on in life, People You May Know can be extremely emotionally impactful. It is a little part of the web UI that brings back the dead, ex partners I still miss, exes who have moved on, and toxic people I had tried to move on from. It’s really put me through the wringer and being able to block that part of the UI forever is something I’m very glad Facebook, in the role I have gladly given it as being an overseer of my (mostly good) emotions, does not and shouldn’t ever stop me from doing. I hope they realize this.

markosaric 7y ago
I love that feature. Use it for all the different things that I don't like to see, that distract me etc. Some of the "annoyances" filters are great too to remove most of those cookie notices and other stuff. They're not on by default but easy to switch on in the uBlock origin settings.
fortydegrees 7y ago
Your last paragraph is really difficult to parse. I originally thought you liked the feature because it put you through the emotional wringer (in terms of making you work through certain negative emotions), and that it wasn't coddling you.
- gorgoiler 7y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. I find writing to be very difficult. It’s really helpful to me when people take the time to point out where I’m not clear, especially when it’s constructive feedback, like yours is.
  - nilkn 7y ago
    For what it's worth, I thought your meaning was clear. Your third paragraph opens with "however," indicating a contrast to the previous one (in which your love for FB is stated). So I interpreted "emotionally impactful" in a negative rather than positive sense. As a result I didn't have any issues with your last paragraph.

blauditore 7y ago

span[data-content="S"] + span[data-content="p"] + span[data-content="o"] + span[data-content="n"] + span[data-content="s"] + span[data-content="o"] + span[data-content="r"] + span[data-content="e"] + span[data-content="d"] { display: none; } This only hides the "d", right? You generally can't hide a higher-level element based on drill-down selectors, so pure CSS wouldn't be enough. But of course, finding the appropriate parent by scripting would be trivial from here. Apart of that, why can't one just accumulate all visible text by filtering out all `display: none` elements? Of course, this could be attacked again by e.g. shrinking the "noise" characters to width 0.

byuu 7y ago
Yeah, I always have to write userscripts to get access to getElementsBy(TagName,Id,etc) and then call .parentNode().parentNode()... to reach the ancestor I want to remove. Of course the downside of userscripts compared to uBlock rules is that they take time to run, so you end up seeing the ads briefly before they are erased, which is annoying. So then I run the scripts prior to page-load to insert CSS rules to hide all elements that might be ads, let the page load, filter it, and then override the older CSS rules. It's quite a hassle, really. What I'm saying is, :parent selectors in CSS would be greatly appreciated.

a_imho 7y ago

How the narrative that content blockers are a non threat has fallen.

rustybolt 7y ago

Nice breakdown. If I open facebook I can see the 'sponsored' as plain text right there in the developer tools... It might make a difference that I'm using chrome in Dutch?

jakub_g 7y ago

For more crazy adblocker avoidance solutions found in the wild, check this presentation from JSConfEU 2019 from an ABP employee: https://2019.jsconf.eu/shwetank-dixit/block-unblock-block-how-ad-blockers-are-being-circumvented-and-how-they-are-fighting-back.html https://2019.jsconf.eu/shwetank-dixit/block-unblock-block-ho... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vk9bPDaZELQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vk9bPDaZELQ

yccheok 7y ago

Don't let Facebook get away with this!

maury91 7y ago

I wrote a similar article some time ago with a look at how to detect them and remove them from the DOM. It was mostly for didactic reasons. https://medium.com/hackernoon/how-i-get-rid-of-the-new-sponsored-facebook-posts-138d013f4bbe https://medium.com/hackernoon/how-i-get-rid-of-the-new-spons... but my approach was to use Javascript instead of CSS

Cougher 7y ago

Commenting about some of the comments . . . Yes, ads are what keeps facebook and other websites running, but there's a blurred line that crosses from offering content for users to offering users as product. To attract readers, they provide content that has value. Then they do everything in their power to distract you from what you came for. When the distraction is too overpowering and irritating many people will complain and leave. It doesn't necessarily mean that we don't understand the money model; it's that we obviously are not going on the internet to see ads that take primacy over our online experience. The line may be blurred, but facebook users are not facebook's customers; they are the product. Facebook offers this product to the businesses that pay for access. Inasmuch as facebook focuses on an engaging user experience, it's only to ensure that they maintain their product so businesses keep buying it. It's interesting how this product maintenance has evolved: like news or reality shows or contest shows, the aim is to introduce tension, and in the case of news topics, anger, which oddly keeps people coming back for more. The aim of providing an engaging user experience has morphed into providing an addictive user experience. And like most addictions, what started out as an enjoyable pleasure transforms into something that controls and destroys us to varying degrees.

dhimes 7y ago
I don't mind ads. I revolt against tracking.

joestr 7y ago

Question for anyone in the know: Is this allowed, from an accessibility point of view? I'm just wondering how someone with a screen reader would know it's an ad? (Or are screenreaders more advanced than I think, and would actually be able to read out 'sponsored')?

mehrdadn 7y ago
AFAIK it's not about the screenreader, but about the browser. The browser knows these aren't visible, so I don't expect it would have any reason to report them to the accessibility interface (IAccessible et al.).

kalado 7y ago

Not only the ads. I once recreate the feed for a university project. Just take a look at the sources. Every element is completely obscured, every class and id is just long random strings.

goatinaboat 7y ago

To me this is very simple, if someone installs an ad or tracking blocker then they are explicitly withdrawing consent, there is absolutely no ambiguity about it. Doing it anyway or de-anonymising them or anything else is impossible to do without equally explicitly knowing that you are violating consent. And every Facebook employee must know it.

clarkenheim 7y ago
You gave consent to see ads when you signed up. Why would the presence of an ad blocker withdraw that consent?
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  Because GDPR states that consent can be withdrawn at any time, and that provision of services can not be tied to consent. That’s the law here in Wales.
  - madisfun 7y ago
    GDPR requires consent for the processing of the personal data. Displaying an ad per se is not regulated by GDPR, and does not require consent. Though personalization of this advertisement requires processing of the PII, and thus it is supposed to be regulated. Facebook UI is full of dark patterns, but it is possible to withdraw consent through settings: www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/

vector_spaces 7y ago

I have seen a similar technique used to build paywalls for research papers that display obfuscated "previews" of the article you clicked on beneath the "pay for access" banner

elierotenberg 7y ago

It reminds me of a lightning talk I gave at ReactConf some time ago :) Basically forward-shuffling the component tree to produce HTML that will be really hard to match using CSS Selectors usually found in adblockers and other DOM-targeting scripts. Code: https://github.com/elierotenberg/react-armor https://github.com/elierotenberg/react-armor Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n63XXHY4A7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n63XXHY4A7I

wayneftw 7y ago

What happens when screen readers can't identify things properly? Can Facebook be sued for not providing proper accessibility, given that their site is deemed to be essential by many? If screen readers can identify something as an advertisement, then so should ad blockers be able to. If not... then aren't we depriving the blind and the sight challenged from valuable advertising equality?

jaywalk 7y ago
I think you're kind of misunderstanding how screen readers work. You're clearly seeing the "Sponsored" text on the screen, and so is the screen reader. It's not that the text isn't there, it's just that it's put there in a way that is nearly impossible to target with CSS-based ad blocking. That's all.
- aguyfromnb 7y ago
  >It's not that the text isn't there, it's just that it's put there in a way that is nearly impossible to target with CSS-based ad blocking. I'm confused too, then. If the screen-reader can see the word "sponsored" easily, why can't any other code? What is the difference between how a screen reader finds "sponsored" vs an ad-blocker?
  - jaywalk 7y ago
    A screen reader is looking at the text as it is rendered. Note that I said CSS-based ad blocking, which is really what the blog post was about. A more advanced ad blocker could certainly find the "Sponsored" text and hide the ad.

cowbird 7y ago

A year ago, I was on Facebook constantly. At one point, I realized that I could do better things with the time wasted there so I installed News Feed Eradicator (I learned about it in a podcast. I think a Peter Attia podcast, but I could be wrong). Anyway, now Facebook is alien to me. I still have it on my laptop, and if I need to search something of for someone,I can use Facebook. But I don't have access to scrolling. I don't have a wall anymore. lol. I don't have the app on my phone though. I feel super.

asow92 7y ago

just stop using facebook. no more ads.

turc1656 7y ago

I don't use Facebook, but I imagine the easiest way of blocking the ads is like most other websites - to block the connection to the ad-server(s), no? That's how uMatrix operates and, in my opinion, that works exceptionally well. It blocks known domains that are ad-servers and that alone blocks damn near everything because of the way ads are served on nearly every single website. In fact it works so well that pretty much the only time I've noticed ads has been when I look at uMatrix and I see there aren't direct user connections to the ad servers. For those pages, it looks like the site itself is acting as a middle man and pulling the ads and inserting into the HTML via scripting. But that's a lot more work for developers to do, as well as more bandwidth and overhead. I don't know if those sites are able to tailor ads to individual users when they do this - they would need some sort of identification to pass to the ad server so the ads on those sites might be generic, not sure. But that's my observation, FWIW.

Tracykelvin 7y ago

Thanks to [[[Robinsonbuckler @yahoo .com]]] because he brought back my Ex husband. my husband left me for his ex girlfriend he had before he married me it’s a difficult situation for me I called and beg him to come back he refused he said he don’t love me anymore I tried every possible way to get him back all was in vain I told my friend about it and she gave me Robinson buckler email and I emailed him and told him my problem and he told me what to do and I did it and he cast a love spell which brought back my husband within 24 hours…………