That was what I was referring to here: > Facebook is already full of advertising disguised as content. From sponsored posts to content from things you "like". So I'm kind of surprised they need to go out of their way to explicitly announce that they will be disguising ads. They already have the power to inject it in the middle of content invisibly.

But Facebook doesn't get any cut of a sponsored post. (meaning a company paid an individual to write a post)

> But Facebook doesn't get any cut of a sponsored post.

"Sponsored Stories" and "Promoted Posts" (one of which I expect is what was meant by "sponsored post") are the names of specific kinds of Facebook ads.

It's a legal requirement in most countries to clearly distinguish ads from content.

Distinguish them to human viewers, not to computers. If the aggregate effect of all the CSS and element classes is to make ads look one way and non-ads look a different way (each with slight variations), it's an AI-complete problem infer an answer to "given these elements and this CSS sheet, which subset of them looks different and add-like to a human?"

Is it an AI-complete problem to do email spam classification? Why is determining if a facebook post is an ad or not so different than spam classification?

It's AI complete to do it with human level accuracy, yes. If you don't mind blocking random friends' posts, you can craft the ad blocker to remove them all.

I actually created a custom adblock filter to block the whole news section. They already show "news" about stuff like prime day sales, so it might as well be advertising.

Care to share?

here's my facebook filters. I don't really do this systematically, I just use the ublock element picker until I'm happy. I think you probably want the trending topics one.

  ! 7/5/2016, 11:08:51 AM https://www.facebook.com/
  www.facebook.com###pagelet_trending_tags_and_topics > ._5mym > ._5spf._2sns 
  
  ! 7/5/2016, 11:09:01 AM https://www.facebook.com/
  www.facebook.com###u_jsonp_3_0
  
  ! 7/5/2016, 11:09:09 AM https://www.facebook.com/
  www.facebook.com###u_jsonp_3_1  
  
  ! 7/5/2016, 11:09:13 AM https://www.facebook.com/
  www.facebook.com###rightCol > ._5v6d._5rzs > ._64a > div:nth-of-type(2)
  
  ! 7/5/2016, 11:09:23 AM https://www.facebook.com/
  www.facebook.com###rightCol

I'd like to mention News Feed Eradicator here - not only does what its name implies, but it adds a motivational quote in the empty space. The quotes are usually about goals, procrastination, etc and it's saved me a lot of (potentially) wasted time.

Ads already affect the experience significantly, this would do so even more.

(not that I use Facebook, but Tumblr for example, has extremely annoying repetitive offensive ads)

Do you remember the time when staff broke the audio ads and they kept looping with no way to stop whatsoever?

And people still go on about blocking ads being unethical

I'd bet their terms allow them to impersonate your own friends.

Sounds like a good application for AI to detect ads.

You wouldn't even even need that. Just a methods for identifying content and aggregating users 'votes' on them. Reach critical mass and start hiding it.