uBlock Origin gave up on Facebook ads - and scam ads are the ones coming back

On August 10, the volunteers who maintain uBlock Origin's default filter lists stopped trying to block Facebook ads. Not the extension - that's alive and still works everywhere else. Just Facebook, which they described in fairly unsparing terms as a site built to defeat them.

Meta's countermeasures are both clever and faintly petty: splitting the word "Ad" across random fragments of code, injecting junk text, randomising the names of page elements, and delivering ads through its own infrastructure so they look identical to ordinary posts. Every fix gets studied and routed around within days. As one maintainer put it, the "by users" half of the project is roughly two people while the "for users" half is tens of millions. The existing Facebook filters aren't being deleted; they just won't be repaired the next time Meta breaks them.

Malwarebytes spelled out the consequence that actually matters to you: ad blockers weren't only stripping out clutter, they were quietly stripping out scam ads too. That counts for more on Facebook than most places. Reuters, working from internal Meta documents, reported the company projected roughly 10% of its 2024 revenue - about $16 billion - would come from ads for scams and banned goods. Meta disputed the framing, calling the estimate "rough and overly-inclusive."

The practical response is to treat every sponsored post in your feed as unchecked, because it is. If an ad shows you something you genuinely want, don't buy through the ad - open a new tab, type the brand's name yourself, and see whether that shop actually exists. The FTC made much the same argument last week about the 50%-off designer bags doing the rounds.

Where these ads do real damage is when they end in a download rather than a checkout. Tendvane's Safety check looks for browser extensions and programs you never chose to install, and its "browser hijacked" wizard puts your homepage and search engine back if something already got in.