
Facebook disguised sponsored ads as regular posts, Adblock Plus fixed that - hinchlt
https://sociable.co/social-media/facebook-disguised-sponsored-ads/
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ipsum2
Reminder that Adblock plus sells ads and extorts advertisers:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/19/business/media/adblock-
pl...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/19/business/media/adblock-plus-created-
to-protect-users-from-ads-opens-the-door.html)
[https://medium.com/@trybravery/please-stop-using-adblock-
but...](https://medium.com/@trybravery/please-stop-using-adblock-but-not-why-
you-think-13280e76c8e7). (HN commentary:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16997272](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".

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tfitz237
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.

~~~
mirkules
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!

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amyjess
Isn't this a violation of FTC rules?

~~~
cjhopman
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.

