Eyeo, the developers of Adblock Plus, report they have succeeded in blocking ads on Facebook for a year now. Two years ago, the social network announced it would continue to bypass ad blockers which started a cat and mouse game.
Facebook initially attempted to bypass ad blockers by making the code of advertisements resemble that of organic Facebook content. Several days later, Facebook's measure was countered by ad blockers after which Facebook responded with another solution so all users would see advertisements again. It didn't take long before ad blockers found a way to bypass that too. This cat and mouse game continued, till ad blockers outsmarted Facebook last year again.
It's been a year now and advertisements can still be blocked on Facebook. According to Adblock Plus, the most popular adblock browser extension, this is possible because their extension is able to “read” advertisements and therefore is able to recognize the typical characteristics of Facebook advertisements. Despite their success, Eyeo expects that the battle with Facebook isn't over yet and that the balance can shift again to their disadvantage.
Recently Eyeo announced a new technology that uses machine learning to block Facebook advertisements.
