Facebook disguised sponsored ads as regular posts, Adblock Plus fixed that

sociable.co

18 points·hinchlt··6 comments

Reminder that Adblock plus sells ads and extorts advertisers: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/19/business/media/adblock-pl... https://medium.com/@trybravery/please-stop-using-adblock-but.... (HN commentary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16997272)

Use Ublock Origin for a real adblock.

Also, I find it suspicious that the user who submitted the post only exclusively submits articles from "sociable-co".

I noticed one of these recently and tried to block it with an adblocker by finding the word Sponsored. I looked at the source code and found that they separated each letter of the word 'Sponsored' into separate html tags, making it impossible to find it by text. So sleazy, Facebook.

That’s brilliant, in an evil way. At that point I would just draw the text on a canvas (not to give any ideas).

It’s ironic that people who use adblockers are the exact people you don’t want to push ads onto, even if you can. They have adblockers for a reason, and they’ll just ignore them anyway!

Isn't this a violation of FTC rules?

Considering that they seem to have blatantly violated their 2011 consent decree with the FTC and nothing happened, I doubt they care.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-19/former-ft...

Only if you interpret what they are saying in the way that they intended you to, despite the fact that it's not what they are explicitly saying.

When they say "Facebook were disguising ‘sponsored posts’ as regular posts", all that means is that Facebook changed something in such a way that Adblock Plus was no longer detecting it as a "sponsored post". It doesn't mean that sponsored posts looked the same to users as regular posts.

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