uBlock Origin maintainers have decided to stop continuously updating filters specifically to keep up with Facebook’s latest ad-blocking countermeasures.

Existing filters will remain, but new Facebook techniques may eventually bypass them. The decision highlights the ongoing cat-and-mouse game between ad blockers and advertising platforms.

Read more: https://digitalescapetools.com/2026/08/ublock-origin-stops-chasing-facebook-ads.html

    • black0ut@pawb.socialEnglish
      9·
      12 days ago

      I have facebook and its spinoffs (instagram, whatsapp, etc) all blocked network-wide through pi-hole. It feels good.

    • Bone@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      12 days ago

      Someone mentioned uBlacklist (for Firefox & Google) and I’ve been using it to do just that, among other sites. DuckDuckGo has its own filtering system.

  • mycodesucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
    641·
    12 days ago

    While facebook is a nightmarish cesspool, this sets a bad precedent.

    If ad companies learn that all they have to do to get around ad blockers is rapidly change their system until developers give up, all of them will do it.

    • tacosanonymous@mander.xyzEnglish
      31·
      12 days ago

      The kind of places that pour those kinds of resources into fighting Adblockers aren’t worth going to. The more people drop them, the better off they’ll be.

      • mycodesucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
        182·
        12 days ago

        Yes, but then what is the point of an adblocker if it doesn’t work the moment a site doesn’t want it to?

        This is ceding the fight. There’s no way of spinning this that hides the fact it’s another sign of the open internet losing the war - hard.

        • piccolo@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          22·
          12 days ago

          Got to pick your battles. Facebook is a trash website that literally Pays nazis to make posts. I say the nazis can just deal with their ad riddled cesspool.

          • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            4·
            11 days ago

            And despite that I still have to go there to find out when a particular business is open, or keep track of upcoming shows for the local wrestling promotion we watch, or if I want to buy or sell anything second hand in my local area because everyone here uses marketplace.

            I can hate Facebook all I want, but enough people use it for things that I need that I’m ultimately forced to engage with it at times. I can avoid it as much as possible, but I can’t avoid it completely.

              • fuzzzerd@programming.devEnglish
                2·
                9 days ago

                It would be nice if this worked, but the reality on the ground is that a significant portion of local businesses, events, and social groups exist only on Facebook and if you don’t want to be on Facebook your option is to not participate or work with significantly incomplete or out of date information.

                Because of this, numbers aren’t published, flyers are not distributed widely if at all, and unless you know someone on the inside who relays information to you you will miss lots.

        • Kairos@lemmy.todayEnglish
          6·
          12 days ago

          Very few sites can do what Facebook did. YouTube is another and they’re loosing.

        • cabillaud@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          4·
          11 days ago

          I think it’s ultimately bad for FB. Either people don’t care and use FB (most of those probably don’t install ublock in the first place) or it will become a constant reminder of how shitty the site is.

        • Natanael@infosec.pubEnglish
          2·
          11 days ago

          Running an LLM or other AI as a classifier could work to make an ad blocker. You just need to render the page in a sandbox and all elements flagged as ads doesn’t get rendered in the real browser tab. It could even fix broken layouts from it. Just look at the absolutely tiny tool-call oriented models that can run in a Raspberry Pi which could be reused.

          In the end you could turn it into the reverse captcha - ads that the bot can’t block will be illegible to humans and thus worthless to advertisers

        • Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2·
          11 days ago

          Yeah dude there a small team fighting a multibillion dollar corporate team. They want to spend time with their kids instead of fighting facebook. If you don’t like that you can step up and do it for them.

      • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        7·
        11 days ago

        Except that it’s specifically going to be sites like Facebook and Youtube - sites with total monopoly over key services - that will put the effort into evading ad blockers like this. Yes, obviously, if everyone dropped those services and moved to a competitor then they wouldn’t have a monopoly, but we live in reality and that’s simply not going to happen overnight.

      • moopet@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        11 days ago

        Well that’s true, but then selling a plugin that does the same thing for your Wordpress site, for example, becomes a business model.

    • Kairos@lemmy.todayEnglish
      4·
      11 days ago

      This is probably a case of the site being changed much faster after Ublock updates than vice-versa.

      • Dave@lemmy.nzEnglish
        5·
        12 days ago

        Oh damn, I remember he used to be super responsive. The second a new facebook change came and ads were slipping through, he would be there posting that he was working on it, and within hours it would be resolved. Given Facebook is actively fighting ad blockers, it must surely be constant thankless work to keep it working.

        • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          11 days ago

          That, and what’s the motivation?

          People start these projects out of personal interest, so if Facebook isn’t even worth going to, what’s the point of all that effort?

  • altphoto@lemmy.todayEnglish
    32·
    12 days ago

    If you’re a Facebook user, don’t. That company sucks. Stop using it. Tell others to not use it.

  • 87Six@lemmy.zipEnglish
    29·
    11 days ago

    Honestly I think the intersection between facebook users and ublock origin users is nearly 0

    • Axeman666@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      7·
      11 days ago

      This sucks. I’ve installed ublock origin on many of my relative’s browsers. I’ll probably be dealing with more virus pop up calls again.

        • Axeman666@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          3·
          11 days ago

          If you’ve worked in IT you know that most users refuse to learn the basics. You can explain things to them in the most direct and simple way and they will still call you again next week for the same thing stupid thing you just helped them with. I had one user that called every month because they couldn’t understand how OneDrive worked, but they just HAD to use the auto save function. Every month I’d help them find the right spreadsheet in OneDrive and fix it for them by combining all the extra spreadsheets they created.

    • bizarroland@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      12 days ago

      I mean, there’s a lot of companies that have Facebook tracking pixels on their page, so there’s a shadow profile of people that are exposed to them Facebook holds, plus Facebook owns Instagram and I believe WhatsApp, which are some of the most widely used apps on the planet.

      • TIEPilot@lemmy.worldEnglish
        41·
        12 days ago

        reddit is using tracking pixel (I believe w/ google) as I can’t make an account w/o it getting insta banded on the machine I originally got banned on for a mistake.

        As for IG/Whatsapp I never had any account for either so nothing lost their for me. And no FB so they aren’t tracking me.

        As for my reddit ban it was so stupid, I used RES and have accounts for general browsing and specialized hobbies of mine. Accidentally posted in an sub I was banned for no reason (remember the blanket bans?) on my hobby acct that wasn’t banned.

        Boom ban evasion, 4 account insta banned across board. I VPN and flip locations between accounts as thats how they used to track you. They got something new as I had accts I never posted on get banned. So its not text pattern recognition. Something on that machine is tattling on me to reddit.

      • TIEPilot@lemmy.worldEnglish
        151·
        12 days ago

        So I hear, its a shame that Craigs List isn’t still popular. No ads, no AI slop, never have to relearn the interface, just works.

        Market Place would do even better if you could use it w/o social media side, having to give up your phone number, are they forcing ID verification? Wouldn’t surprise me if they were. Can’t do it.

        • Leon@pawb.socialEnglish
          6·
          12 days ago

          Facebook spontaneously banned me from their marketplace some years ago. I have never used it. Don’t think I’ve even checked it out.

          • TIEPilot@lemmy.worldEnglish
            21·
            12 days ago

            They must be taking their cues from reddit. At least you weren’t using it so no loss.

            • Leon@pawb.socialEnglish
              6·
              12 days ago

              Only reason I still have a Facebook account is because the rescue my dog came from has a group there. I check in a couple of times per year. There’s nothing else of value on that platform for me.

        • OwOarchist@pawb.socialEnglish
          5·
          12 days ago

          So I hear, its a shame that Craigs List isn’t still popular. No ads, no AI slop, never have to relearn the interface, just works.

          And Craigslist search is much better.

          I swear, Facebook makes their marketplace search shitty on purpose, so you’ll spend more time on their site searching for things.

        • Dudewitbow@lemmy.zipEnglish
          21·
          12 days ago

          there’s a cost to anonymity, and one of them is people like to check buyers profiles to see if they are rmeotely serious buyers or not.

          user to user selling sites are already packed with low ballers, bots and fake accounts. some people would like to not even interact with them.

          anonymity is also attracts fake listings more. not that fbm doesnt have them but its usually very obvious when a listing is fake, if not, the profile its attached to.

        • AgentSeven@lemmy.zipEnglish
          6·
          12 days ago

          I still use it, it’s great. Unlike FBM, you can actually search for things and use filters and have saved searches that notify you when someone posts something that triggers a saved search. Facebook intentionally gimps their “find” functionality so you have to scroll through generic categories and look at a thousand things you don’t want just to find the one thing you do. This is because it keeps you on their site - everything about Facebook is such a fucking turd sandwich.

          Craigslist’s problem is they just don’t do anything but exist as near as I can tell. They don’t update their UI (which I actually appreciate). They allow people to post the same listing every fucking day which is super annoying. They do nearly nothing to deal with scammers and bad user behavior (like storefronts claiming to be individuals) and rather than deal with that, people just left because Facebook might suck but most of the people on it who might contact you are at least verifiable.

          So Craigslist is kind of threadbare, but there’s still a good bit of stuff on it. If you do saved searches that trigger emails and you’re patient, you can often get what you want (although I frequently update saved searches to exclude the idiot savants reposting every day).

          I feel like it’s becoming a bit more popular again now that OfferUp and all their ilk have, believe it or not, shit the bed even worse.

        • bizarroland@lemmy.worldEnglish
          61·
          12 days ago

          Craigslist is still fully operational and functional, and the only thing that has changed about it is that it doesn’t have a personals site anymore.

        • dotCody@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          12 days ago

          FOSTA-SESTA. Craigslist shut down the personals section in 2018 and thus effectively killed the majority of traffic to their website.

        • moopet@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          11 days ago

          It’s not popular where I am (Scotland). There’s nothing for sale in my area at all, except ads for clearly spammy things like spiritual services and some guy who wants people’s underwear.

      • snowdriftissue@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        11 days ago

        Plenty of good deals on craigslist/OfferUp in my experience, and sellers are much less flakey. I tried fb marketplace a while ago after hearing repeatedly how it was so much better and I was not impressed.

    • alsimoneau@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      11 days ago

      WhatsApp, Messenger and Marketplace are big ones. It’s already hard enough to get family and friends to message you elsewhere, good luck convincing strangers to buy/sell stuff elsewhere.

  • hirihit640@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    22·
    12 days ago

    Everybody here is saying just don’t use facebook, but doesn’t Facebook have ads on other websites as well, just like Google Ads? Are those going to start evading Ublock as well?

  • freudian_slop@programming.devEnglish
    15·
    12 days ago

    People will still use Facebook because of Facebook Marketplace, Facebook Pages of restaurants, festivals, celebrities or simply stubborn uneducated friends and family using Facebook

    • VitoRobles@lemmy.todayEnglish
      10·
      11 days ago

      And that’s why it’s important to either:

      1. Push people to stop using FB/linking to Facebook for those things
      2. Create web scrapers to extract content off of Facebook and share it somewhere else
      • Hawke@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        11 days ago

        Do you have suggestions for alternatives? Especially the event/scheduling part of Facebook remains the one killer app holding me there. Even as much as it sucks, it’s very effective in getting everyone aware of events and when they’re happening.

        • ayyy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          3·
          11 days ago

          Everyone except the large portion of people who don’t use Facebook. There are literally hundreds of other event invitation websites.

          • Hawke@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            11 days ago

            That’s fine, but I don’t know of any that meet the requirements

            What I see out there seems to fall into:

            • “party invitation/RSVP” (evite, paperlesspost)
            • “event ticketing” (eventbrite)
            • schedule coordination (when2meet, whenisgood, whencanwehang)
            • business calendar (Google Calendar, Outlook, etc.)

            Meetup is close, and discord’s events system is kinda-sorta okay. Those are the best I know of and they’re still not good.

    • wieson@feddit.orgEnglish
      4·
      11 days ago

      That’s very regional. Around here, people use eBay, Kleinanzeigen and Vinted and Facebook for restaurants never took off. They’re all on Google maps and that’s enough or they have their own website.

    • schipelblorp@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      11 days ago

      Marketplace is remarkably unenshittified. That’s probably why it’s been so dominant.

      I know we’ve lost track of it given the years of monopoly, but connecting people to other people is a remarkably powerful and simple process. Craigslist took over just be taking classified ads and putting them online. The tech is absolutely trivial, the real challenge is getting everyone to use the same site. The issue is that you can get people to use the same site by advertising and blitzing, THEN you can use that network effect to fuck everyone over.

      I think eventually, corporations will continue to enshittify everything until open source alternatives become viable and then ultimately dominant. We’re already seeing this happen with Microsoft: companies and countries are realizing they can not have core services dependent on a profit-maximizing monopoly and are switching to opensource projects that they can control.

  • pivot_root@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    12 days ago

    This is when the community needs to come together and double down on creating filters for Facebook. If Facebook gets away with overwhelming adblock developers until they give up, other ad networks will follow.

      • pivot_root@lemmy.worldEnglish
        21·
        12 days ago

        As are you. The more the better, in fact. Or is that just a high horse you’re riding, assuming that every person who suggests community action has the ulterior motive of making other people do their work for them?