FB reblock: ad-blocking community finds workaround to Facebook · 2016-08-11 16:54 by Ben Williams

Well, that was fast.

Two days ago we broke it to you that Facebook had taken “the dark path,” and decided to start forcing ad-blocking users to see ads on its desktop site. We promised that the open source community would have a solution very soon, and, frankly, they’ve beaten even our own expectations. A new filter was added to the main EasyList about 15 minutes ago. You’ll just need to update your filter lists (see below for how).

If you want to manually add the filter, here is the code you need:

facebook.com##DIV[id^="substream_"] ._5jmm[data-dedupekey][data-cursor][data-xt][data-xt-vimpr="1"][data-ftr="1"][data-fte="1"]

As many of you know, the filter lists that “tell” Adblock Plus what to block are in fact the product of a global community of web citizens. This time that community seems to have gotten the better of even a giant like Facebook.

So apparently, you don’t want no problems with the ad-blocking community … (Just kidding, Big Z … please don’t destroy me with your blue and white drones).

What you need to do to start re-blocking ads on Facebook

Update your filter lists now. If you don’t know how to do that, here is a tutorial. That’s it. Now just go to Facebook on your desktop, and things should go back to normal.

… or just wait for a day or so, then the filter list will be updated automatically.

Either way, you’ll be back to this soon:

This is still a cat-and-mouse game

Facebook might “re-circumvent” at any time. As we wrote in the previous post, this sort of back-and-forth battle between the open source ad-blocking community and circumventers has been going on since ad blocking was invented; so it’s very possible that Facebook will write some code that will render the filter useless — at any time. If that happens, the ad-blocking community will likely find another workaround, then Facebook might circumvent again, etc.

Also, you should be aware that this filter has not been heavily tested, so if you think it’s blocking more/less than it should let us/EasyList know.

But for this round of the cat-and-mouse contest, looks like the mouse won.

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