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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fuck em, call them on the phone, tell them facebook banned you because someone with the same name called you an impostor so you have no choice.
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and if you don’t want to be on Facebook your option is to not participate or work with significantly incomplete or out of date information.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.
Yep, be the change you want to see in the world
Very few sites can do what Facebook did. YouTube is another and they’re loosing.
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.
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.
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
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.
Well that’s true, but then selling a plugin that does the same thing for your Wordpress site, for example, becomes a business model.
The way I understand it, this is less “we can’t keep up” and more “FB isn’t worth it.”
This is probably a case of the site being changed much faster after Ublock updates than vice-versa.