On: Facebook backtracks after removing Warren ads calling for Facebook breakup

[Simulacra]

Just curious, how many out there use some type of Facebook ad-blocking solution?

[newscracker → Simulacra]

Can’t find canonical sources right now, but the percentage of users of Facebook on mobile is 90%+. Of that, most of them would be using the official app, where traditional ad blockers wouldn’t work.

But ad blocking is enough of a money problem for Facebook that it keeps attempting to beat them through many tricks (spelling words with invisible characters, putting words split into characters and each one in a <span>, etc., to beat pattern matching).

The rare times when I use Facebook, I always login through a browser with an ad blocker (and tracker blockers) on.

[ashelmire → Simulacra]

Block it via /etc/hosts

[pmoriarty → Simulacra]

My Facbook ad-blocking solution has been to:

1 - quit Facebook

2 - use /etc/hosts to resolve any Facebook-related sites (and other advertising/spam/tracking/malware sites) to 255.255.255.255

3 - proxy my web requests through privoxy

4 - use the uMatrix and uBlock Origin addons in Firefox that block anything that gets through the rest

But I mostly browse the web through emacs-w3m, which isn't even capable of running javascript so addons such as uMatrix are not necessary.

Needless to say, I almost never see ads.