Facebook is too tough. uBlock Origin has given in.

Facebook and ad blocker developers have been playing a cat-and-mouse game for years. Now, one of the most well-known projects has apparently lost patience. The team that maintains the filters for uBlock Origin has labeled its support for Facebook ads as a “wontfix” and said it will no longer support Facebook.

The problem isn't that uBlock Origin suddenly can no longer block regular online ads. Facebook is increasingly displaying its sponsored posts in a way that makes them very difficult to reliably distinguish from users' regular content.

A classic online ad can often be identified by its domain, script, or page element and can be easily removed. Facebook ads, however, travel through a similar infrastructure to regular posts and are also visually closely integrated into them. An overly aggressive filter can therefore hide posts, comments, or even break individual Facebook features along with the ads. The developers of AdBlock also warn that sponsored posts on Facebook are significantly more difficult to filter precisely because of their similarity to regular content.

The developers of the uBlock Origin filters are quite direct. They accuse Facebook of monitoring the publicly available work of open source projects and then modifying the website in such a way that their solutions stop working again. Since the uBlock Origin filters are publicly available on GitHub, Meta actually has the ability to see how ads are recognized and adjust the site accordingly.

This doesn't mean that uBlock Origin will become useless on Facebook. It can still block many trackers and other elements. But it does mean that users can no longer count on the default filters to reliably remove Facebook's sponsored posts.