AIBRIEF
uBlock Origin's maintainers say Facebook has spent five years breaking the project's filter rules by splitting "Sponsored" into individual letters, and the core team is stepping back.
uBlock Origin, the open-source ad blocker used by tens of millions of people, has stopped maintaining the filter rules that hid Facebook ads, with no changelog entry to mark the change. Users who relied on the extension will start seeing "Sponsored" posts they had been filtering out, even with the blocker enabled.
A uBO maintainer explained on the project's GitHub issue tracker that for roughly five years Facebook has been splitting the word "Sponsored" into individual letters, each wrapped in its own line of code, and at times randomizing the order or inserting fake characters to defeat pattern-matching filters. The maintainer called Facebook "a disgusting anti-user site" and said the company watches open-source projects working in public and counters them, while its own developers earn seven-figure salaries. The "by users" side of uBlock Origin is, by the maintainer's account to Piunikaweb, roughly two volunteers trying to keep pace with a platform engineering team.
uBO is not deleting Facebook filters wholesale. The team invited community pull requests from anyone who wants to take on the work, but the core maintainers are stepping back. There is no dated release notes line formalizing the change; it is a posture statement on the issue tracker, not a shipped update.
The withdrawal lands inside a wider squeeze. Google's MV2-to-MV3 migration in Chrome already crippled uBO on Chromium browsers, and Microsoft has separately signaled a phaseout of MV2 extensions in Edge, compounding the platform pressure on the project.