Just two days after Facebook changed their ad delivery mechanisms to defeat ad blocking technology, Adblock Plus has begun blocking Facebook ads once again through an update to their ad filters.
This honestly isn't that surprising. Every time a company comes out and claims they have found a way to stop ad blockers, the developers of said ad blockers find a way to block ads once more. Adblock Plus has stated that "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."
The latest update to Adblock Plus' filters removes ads from both the Facebook sidebar and the news feed. Adblock Plus company spokesperson Ben Williams says that the ad-blocking community will continue to find workarounds for any supposed ad-block blockers, even if Facebook pushes out yet another update that forces ad blockers to display ads.
Facebook is understandably annoyed that their ad-block blocker has been defeated so quickly. The company also believes that the new filter for blocking Facebook ads is removing some legitimate content, such as posts from friends and pages. In a statement, Facebook said that "this isn't a good experience for people and we plan to address the issue."
This latest saga began when Facebook introduced a change to ad signifiers, which they thought made ad content indistinguishable from regular content. However according to Williams, all Adblock Plus had to do was find "the non-standard indicators they began using" and their extension would block Facebook ads once more.
After some heated arguments this past week, some of you have asked for TechSpot's official stance on ad blocking. Knowing that ad blocking directly affects us as a business and that some of you use ad block while others have decided to whitelist us, or don't use a blocker at all. We appreciate your consideration and feedback which you can leave on this open discussion in our forums.