Facebook can’t win against ad blockers: Study

Washington: Researchers, including one of Indian-origin, have created an experimental ad to show that social media giant Facebook can’t win the war it started on ad blockers. When the Facebook Ad Highlighter is installed, ads in the News Feed are greyed out and written over with the words this is an ad.

Last week, Facebook had announced that it was taking measures to prevent ad blockers from working.
Two days after Facebook’s announcement, Adblock Plus, the biggest ad blocker informed users of a simple tweak to their settings that would defeat the social media websites’ blocker blockade.

Last week, Facebook had announced that it was taking measures to prevent ad blockers from working. Two days after Facebook’s announcement, Adblock Plus, the biggest ad blocker informed users of a simple tweak to their settings that would defeat the social media websites’ blocker blockade.

In a blog post, Arvind Narayanan from Princeton University in the US wrote what is happening here is that Facebook’s HTML code for ads has slight differences from the code for regular posts, so that Facebook can keep things straight for its own internal purposes.
Because of the open nature of the web, Facebook is forced to expose these differences to the browser and to extensions such as Adblock Plus.

The line of code above allows Adblock Plus to distinguish the two categories by exploiting those differences, Narayanan wrote.
Researchers created a prototype tool that detects Facebook ads without relying on hidden HTML code to distinguish them, ‘MIT Technological Review’ reported. It looks at the parts of the Web page that are visible to humans. Facebook Ad Highlighter simply looks for and blocks any posts with a giveaway sponsored tag.

Source: PTI