Adblock Plus Defeats Facebook New Ad Blocking Restrictions

Facebook and Adblock, a popular web browser plugin that blocks ads are involved in a serious tug of war over users’ right to not see obtrusive online advertising, but it seems that Facebook is now winning.

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, 26% of internet users in the USA have desktop ad blockers, and since AdBlock Plus is a very popular option for ad blocking, the large majority of those users will now.

“We’ve designed our ad formats, ad performance and controls to address the underlying reasons people have turned to ad blocking software”, Andrew Bosworth, Facebook VP for ads. It also gave users an increased control over the types of ads they see.

Facebook could be in for a long-running skirmish with ad blockers.

If the new filter is indeed blocking normal posts and pages, the issue lies with Facebook, Adblock Plus communications manager Ben Williams told CNET. “If that happens, the ad-blocking community will likely find another workaround, then Facebook might circumvent again, etc.”, Williams said.

Either way, it sounds like Facebook plans to keep on fighting to make its advertising partners happy.

Facebook set off a firestorm in the ad blocking community earlier this week when it announced that it would introduce new code for its ads that would make them impervious to software blockers.

Two days ago, Social Barrel reported that Facebook started blocking ad blockers.

Adblock Plus warned its users of that possibility: “You should be aware that this filter has not been heavily tested”, the company wrote in its blog post, adding that if people find the software blocking more than it should to let them know.

Of course, Facebook isn’t paying for or creating any of the content from news publishers who are left to “feed on scraps”, as a Bloomberg executive recently said. Facebook likely will counter this move with a change of its own.

The release of the latest AdBlock Plus update is bad news for Facebook, which rolled out supposedly “un-blockable” ads just two days before, leading insiders to believe that the social media network is actively evading ad blockers.

The social network argues that it is balancing out the force-fed-nature of the ads by also giving folks tighter control over what information can be shared with advertisers and what topics the targeted ads will cover. According to a statement given to the Verge by a Facebook spokesperson, in addition to blocking ads, Adblock Plus is also hiding some usercontent.