uBlock Origin quits fighting Facebook ads — Meta's tricks finally wore devs down

The developers behind the popular ad blocker uBlock Origin have announced they are ending support for blocking ads on Facebook. The team said they are tired of constantly chasing workarounds against the platform's ever-changing countermeasures and will no longer track modifications made by the social network.

In a post on Reddit, the project's developers delivered a harsh verdict on Facebook, calling it "a disgusting site that is set against users." According to the team, the platform actively monitors open-source projects — which operate transparently by design — and works against them by serving malicious ads. The developers noted that this work is reportedly done by engineers earning seven-figure salaries.

Despite stepping back, the team said anyone who wants to fight Facebook ads can still submit their own filter fixes through merge requests. The blocker's effectiveness on the Meta-owned network now depends entirely on volunteers.

One Reddit user described an attempt to block the word "Sponsored" in ads using uBlock's element picker tool. They discovered that Facebook splits the word into individual letters, each placed in a separate line of code. A member of the uBlock Origin team confirmed that the social network has used this technique for about five years. Sometimes the platform goes even further, randomizing the order of letters and inserting fake characters to confuse pattern-matching filters.

The news comes amid a difficult period for ad blockers overall. In June, Google decided to disable all such extensions in Chrome, a move that also dealt a significant blow to uBlock Origin and similar tools. The combination of platform-level restrictions and increasingly sophisticated countermeasures from sites like Facebook is putting constant pressure on the open-source community that maintains these extensions.