Facebook will lose the battle with ad blockers

The social network Facebook has started to struggle with ad blockers. The company's management does not like the fact that some of the users of the resource do not see advertising materials. Andrew Bosworth, vice president of advertising and business platform for Facebook, said that advertising is part of the social network. And it is through Facebook advertising that exists.

For this reason, it was decided to show ads to all users of the desktop version of Facebook, bypassing the blockers. New technologies created by the company complicate the process of finding ad inserts for AdBlock Plus and related tools. The format of advertising, which is allegedly impossible to block, was submitted on Monday. But just two days later, a filter was created for AdBlock Plus that isolates the updated ad format. Facebook is doing everything possible to defeat the blockers. Experts believe that in this battle, the social network will inevitably lose.

And indeed - after the first “battle of intelligence”, Facebook found a way to bypass the AdBlock Plus filter, social network ads began to appear to users with an installed blocker and a written filter. After just a few hours, the AdBlock Plus community found another way to detect “invincible” ads. Facebook made a knight's move and rolled out another version of it. The developers of the blockers solved the problem in this case as well. All this has been going on for several days.
')
Ervind Narayan, the author of the extension that marks ads on Facebook, argues that a social network can do nothing with blockers. And there are two reasons for this. One is purely technical, the second is legal.

First, the Internet is an open platform. When you visit facebook.com, company servers send a specific data set to your PC, laptop or mobile phone. Along with this information, a packet of instructions is also sent, which tells the browser how all this information should be structured and displayed on the screen of the user's system. The browser, in general, gives the user a high level of control over what is displayed on the screen. You can enhance the control with the help of various browser extensions, which include ad blockers.

In order to make Facebook advertising invisible after its modification by a social network, it took just one line of text for the new filter:

facebook.com##div[id^="substream_"] div[id^="hyperfeed_story_id_"][data-xt]

Facebook representatives have already announced that their ads will be part of the social networking page, and therefore blocking will be impossible. In fact this is not true. Any advertising that a social network adds to its pages is slightly different from the general content. The Facebook developer has to hide these differences from browser-blocking browser extensions. But the code, which is spelled out above, helps the blocker to determine advertising based on a number of indications of the method of hiding advertising used by the developers of the social network.

Facebook engineers can try to complicate ad detection by making unreadable ID elements or by placing the ID of ad inserts on each page at random. Experts are surprised that the social network is not yet doing this. But the company has a rather limited set of tools - it will not be able to jump higher than its head, so to speak.

Secondly, according to the rules established by the US Federal Trade Commission, advertising cannot be anything but different from the surrounding content. It must stand out in one way or another.



Facebook should make advertising visible to the person. Now advertising, even if it promotes videos, contain the word “Sponsored” in the title. A part of the advertisements is the ad management tool (shown in the screenshot above). And this means that without much difficulty you can create an ad blocker that will act like a person, looking for advertisements for visual features. Such a tool will have innate immunity to attempts to hide something in the code or to make the advertising material ID unreadable.

The prototype of such a tool to block advertising has already been created. It detects advertising materials without analyzing hidden HTML code (the source can be found here ). So far this is a very simple tool that analyzes the posts in the user's tape for the presence of advertiser paid entries, that is, advertising. Now this is only a proof of concept that works, and not bad.



This tool does not hide advertising, but simply marks it, as shown in the figure above.

All this should be obvious to engineers from Facebook. Talking about "open advertising" is only talk, because the company must adhere to the existing rules of the US Trade Commission. There will always be obvious signs of promotional materials on which the blockers will work. The only way for a company to keep an advertisement visible to users is to make it useful to them. Then there will be no need to hide promotional materials. And after all, advertising is also hidden because now many advertising materials are simply stuffed with scripts that transmit user data as they want and where they want. And in some cases, the attackers are building malicious banners into the banners that allow you to access personal data of users - this has already happened.

Facebook is trying to rectify the situation by giving users more control over their advertising. These tools allow you to choose your preferred type of advertising. If there is no interest in any topic, you can simply remove it. The social network also provides the user with the opportunity to remove themselves from the list of clients of certain companies that make up such lists for displaying targeted advertising. But so far this is only a drop in the ocean of the total amount of work that needs to be done so that users stop hiding ads on Facebook.

With certainty, we can now talk about one thing: if Facebook continues to fight blockers, the social network will lose, no matter how long this “battle” would not continue.