Adblock Plus able to re-block the forced Facebook advertisements within 48 hours

It was just two days ago that Facebook had announced that it would be forcing advertisements onto users, bypassing any of the advertisement blockers. Within 48 hours of the announcement, the popular Adblock service was able to offer a workaround which rendered the Facebook’s forced advertisements useless.

The workaround, posted on the Adblock Plus website yesterday, claims to block the Facebook’s forced advertisements. A code was provided and the corresponding filter was added to the filter library of Adblock Plus.

In order to use the new filter of Adblock Plus, and reblock the Facebook’s advertisements again, users just need to update the filter lists of their Adblock Plus browser extension. As soon as the extension updates, the users would be able to re-block the Facebook’s advertisements again until Facebook is able to bypass this filter as well.

The post read,

“This sort of back-and-forth battle between the open source ad-blocking community and circumventers has been going on since ad blocking was invented; so it’s possible that Facebook will write some code that will render the filter useless”.

Boz, the VP of Ads & Business Platform Facebook, commented that they know about the workaround and, they were looking to address the issue.

@Techmeme these new attempts don’t just block ads but also posts from friends and Pages. We plan to address the issue.

— Boz (@boztank) August 11, 2016

Facebook had rolled out a ‘new update’ which was capable of bypassing the advertisement blockers. In the new update, Facebook had changed the way how its advertisements were being recognized by the browser, or if that matter by the third party advertisement blocker services. For that purpose, Facebook had disguised the advertisement’s code inscribing it well within the code of usual content. But for the open source community of the Adblock Plus, it was just a matter of few lines of codes.