Facebook ads are so hard to block that uBlock Origin stopped filtering them

Facebook ads have always been a problem for everyone. Users generally dislike them because the platform keeps a constant eye on everything they do, so it can serve them targeted ads; the quality and credibility of ads is questionable a lot of the time; and they’re impossible to block in the long run.

Developers of ad blocking tools have been at war with Facebook for years now. As soon as someone figures out how to consistently block Facebook ads from showing, the company switches gears and changes the mechanism to bypass those blockers. The last in line of ad-blocking tools that can’t seem to keep up with Facebook is uBlock Origin.

After years of going back and forth with the social media network, uBlock Origin has decided to stop blocking Facebook ads entirely. This comes from the uBlockOrigin subreddit, where a member of the development team shared that the tool won’t be filtering Facebook ads anymore, citing the platform's continuous circumvention of ad-blocking filters as the main reason. Developers of the popular, but increasingly hampered ad-blocking tool simply chose to stop keeping up with Facebook’s changes.

"We won't support Facebook any more. It's a disgusting anti-user site. All it does is watching open-source projects doing everything in public and counter them to deliver the malicious ads. Yep, the devs that receive 7-figure dollar salary is just doing this," said a uBlock Origin developer in the Reddit post.

The developers noted that anyone still interested in fighting Facebook's ad delivery is welcome to submit their own filter fixes as pull requests. So, the door isn’t entirely closed, but that effort requires more volunteers.

The same post talks about some of Facebook’s tactics for bypassing the adblockers. A user in the thread described trying to use uBlock's element picker to block the word "Sponsored" on ads, only to find Facebook splits the word into individual letters, each wrapped in its own line of code. A member of the uBO development team confirmed this isn't new, and that the technique has been in use for roughly five years. They also added that Facebook has at times gone further by randomizing letter order and inserting fake characters to throw off pattern-matching filters.

It’s been a rough stretch for uBlock Origin. Despite support from the community, Google rendered it unusable on Chrome with the switch from Manifest V2 (MV2) to MV3. Recently, Microsoft has also confirmed a timeline to phase out uBlock Origin and similar extensions. At least, Firefox and Brave are still supporting it, so the tool still has a home.

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