Adblock Plus: How To Block Facebook Annoyances In 3 Simple Steps

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After last year’s Facebook IPO, the amount of ads, sponsored content and other ‘stuff’ you might like, increased tremendously. In the last months it reached the point that it started significantly harm the user experience.

‘Games you might like’

Besides ads and other sponsored content, Facebook recently injected more unwanted content into your newsfeed. Games you might like, concert tickets, trending videos and much more unsolicited elements take up significant space of your newsfeed.

If you do not want to put up with these excessive invasions on your favorite social media anymore, you can remove all annoyances within a few minutes. By blocking all ads and other elements such as ‘Games you might like’, ‘Games your friends are playing’, Facebook will become a pleasant experience again which allows you to focus on the stories that you really want to see.

Removing unwanted Facebook elements using Adblock Plus

From all the available solutions to remove elements on Facebook, Adblock Plus is the easiest solution. This is a browser extension available for Chrome, Firefox and Opera, which block all annoying ads all over the web, including Facebook.

The setup process is very simple, and it takes only a few seconds:

1. Go to the Adblock Plus website.

2. Download Adblock Plus by clicking the big green button. Upon completion, you will be free from all the ads on the Web, as well as from the following Facebook elements:

  • Sponsored ads
  • Sponsored “Pages you may like”
  • Logout ads
  • Sponsored search results
  • Sponsored pages your friends like
  • Sponsored related posts of pages your friends like
  • Sponsored suggested posts

3. If you like to block other elements, you can manually add additional filters to Adblock Plus.

Manually adding filter rules in Adblock Plus

Besides he elements that are clearly marked as ads or sponsored posts, there are more annoying parts on Facebook, that also can be blocked. For example, ‘Games you may like’, ‘People you may know’, ‘Trending videos’, are unwanted Facebook elements, which cannot be disabled in the settings. Adblock Plus can help with this.

Since Adblock Plus only blocks ads out of the box, you have to ‘tell’ it to block other elements by creating a few filters. Manually adding filters sounds tricky, but, it is very easy to do:

On Firefox, go to the bottom-left corner, and on the “ABP” logo. Then, in the pop-up menu, choose “Filter preferences…” > “Custom filters” > “Add a filter group”. Then, right-click this and choose the “Show/Hide Filters” option. Then, on the right side of the box, choose: “Add filter”. Then, copy-paste the filter rule in here and confirm.

For Google Chrome and Opera, right-click the Adblock Plus (ABP) logo in the address bar, and click “Options” > “Add your own filters”.

This will open a window, where the custom filters can be pasted.

To remove unsolicited elements from Facebook, the following filters can be used:

“People you may know”, “Games you may like”, “Games your friends are playing” and “Recommended pages”, can be blocked by adding the following rule to your filters:

facebook.com##.egoOrganicColumn

“Trending videos”, “Most Shared”, “Upcoming Concerts” and “Games Your Friends Are Playing”, can be removed from your newsfeed by adding the following rule:

facebook.com##.uiStreamAttachments ._4hh

“Recently Released Albums” can be blocked by adding: facebook.com##.uiStreamAttachments ._4hl

“Page X is posting about Page Y” can be blocked by using this filter: facebook.com##.storyContent > .storyUnconnectedPost

After adding your desired filter rules, Facebook will become the happy place again, as it once was.

Rutger van Dijk is open-source enthusiast. He loves to write about Google Chrome, Chrome Webstore, Chromium, privacy, and Adblock Plus. He owns and writes for https://adblockplus.org/

8 thoughts on “Adblock Plus: How To Block Facebook Annoyances In 3 Simple Steps”

  1. Facebook ads are increasing day by day. Its annoying. Adblock Plus addons will be best tool to block this ads. I am also thinking to use it.

    Thanks for sharing details how to block Facebook ads

    Reply
  2. The one reason I refrain from visiting the Facebook these days is due to the myriad ads which pops up when one logs into the window. I guess the adblock plus can provide the correct remedy for this problem. Thanks for the share.

    Reply
  3. This is really cool. Finally there is some solution to those extremely annoying ads popping up when you least want them. And the best part is it is easy to use and install. Thanks for sharing the useful information.

    Reply
  4. AdBlock Plus is winner on PC but terrible on Android. Avoid it on Android. It randomly allows ad. And sometimes even though it is working ADs are not blocked AT ALL! And this is not one off. It has happened several times.

    Reply
  5. Thanks for the interesting post. However, I am sad to say that Quickheal does not block many pop-up and pop-under ads. I have been using your software for nearly five years now.

    Reply
  6. I personally would advise against the aggressive approach of blocking adblock users access to the content. Tested it on one site – it increased bounce rate and it seems the visitors just went away instead of disabling adblock. Even if adblock users are not direct income source, they may share your content and increase your popularity.

    Harold Burton

    Reply
  7. Nice! As a firefox user that uninstalled flash months ago I can say it’s nice to live in the future, and I’m happy Chrome users will join soon. There are some pages that cause problems when completely removing flash, but it’s far less important than it was a few years ago. And as noscript user I’m used to web pages not working properly…
    Joseph Donahue

    Reply

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