I remember there was a bug (or intended behavior?) of people getting their accounts banned for certain kinds of mundane chat messages in live streams and I’m a little spooked that the same will happen with the recent escalation in the adblocking arms race.
The passive-aggressive "I’m just a smol bean multinational media conglomerate and you’ve blocked ads on my page
" messages that sometimes make it through my adblocker certainly feel like a precursor to more punitive action.
Sometimes I get those pop ups when I’m reading news from outlets with millionaire pundits like CNN or NBC, and I always gleefully click on “I’ll disable my adbloxker next time”
The more pathetic the message, the more gleeful I get. “Motherfucker, I am below the poverty level, and you are literally Reuters.”
I take those motherfuckers out with Ublock’s element picker and zapper. No more half measures.
I’ve never got any of those popups and I use Firefox + uBlock Origin
I have that for my laptop, and all is well, but there’s no similar combo that works on my elderly tablet.
That’s part of the concern. We never even see the warnings, but they still know we’re blocking ads. Next they shrug and lock our accounts, because “but muh ad revenueee!”