One of my hobbies is writing userscripts, specifically adblockers for sites I frequent. Facebook in particular proved a great and worthy adversary on that front, thanks to their attempts to thwart my userscripts. Until very recently, they employed a unique combination of obfuscation techniques to prevent adblockers from programmatically identifying and removing their “Sponsored” posts. Anyway, until recently I had a working (albeit hacky) adblock heuristic for Facebook that did the job. However, sometime today I noticed that my script stopped working. Upon further inspection, they seem to have gone back to simply embedding the word “Sponsored” in plaintext, making it trivial for userscripts and adblockers to select and remove these elements. Is it a fluke, or did Facebook just give up fighting adblock?
Story Published at: August 16, 2022 at 05:32AM
Story Published at: August 16, 2022 at 05:32AM