posted in Technology

uBlock Origin Is Giving Up the Fight to Keep Ads Off Facebook

digitalescapetools.com/2026/08/ublock-origin-stops-chasing-facebook-ads.html
digitalescapetools.comuBlock Origin Is Giving Up the Fight to Keep Ads Off FacebookuBlock Origin's volunteer team will no longer chase Facebook's shifting ad-detection tricks, calling it a 'disgusting anti-user site.' Here's what that means for your feed.

Replying to @⁨inari@piefed.zip⁩

Let me preface this by saying that I am generally against AI and I hate LLMs being pushed everywhere, but I currently hate facebook and social media even more than AI.

I think that ad blocking might actually be a good use of a model trained to detect ads: AI models are “black boxes” and it would make it difficult for facebook to find out precisely how the detection works and workaround it. Imagine a tiny classifier running locally, whose only job is to look at a post html or resulting rendered pixels and detecting if it’s an ad or not, and then generating the blocking rules.

It would be quite cool, because it would work on any website without an explicit list of ad-blocking rules that somebody needs to maintain.