Considering the fact that Facebook made somewhere in the neighborhood of $6.2 billion off of advertising revenue alone last quarter, it is hardly surprising that the company would want to stamp out ad blockers, but that feat is easier said than done. Earlier this week, Facebook enacted a new feature that was aimed at making its ads indistinguishable from organic content, which was supposed to bypass ad blockers, but the creators of popular browser extension AdBlock Plus say they have already found a way around this.

When Facebook launched its new feature earlier this week, the creators of AdBlock Plus penned a blog post calling the move “anti-user.”

“This is an unfortunate move, because it takes a dark path against user choice,” AdBlock Plus said in the blog post. “But it’s also no reason to overreact: cat-and-mouse games in tech have been around as long as spammers have tried to circumvent spam filters.”

The team noted that Facebook had previously conducted a survey to discover why users turn to ad blockers, and the most common answer was that ads are annoying and intrusive. “So if that’s true,” the AdBlock Team argued, “Facebook apparently agrees that users have a good reason for using ad-blocking software … but yet those users shouldn’t be given the power to decide what they want to block themselves?”

Now it seems that AdBlock Plus may already be a step ahead of Facebook, as the team behind the extension says they have discovered a workaround that will once again block ads on Facebook.

“We promised that the open source community would have a solution very soon, and, frankly, they’ve beaten even our own expectations,” the AdBlock Plus team said. The workaround is a short snippet of code that can be added to the AdBlock Plus filter. This demonstrates the power of crowdsourcing, as a short string of text has managed to undo the work of a multi-billion dollar corporation like Facebook.

Of course, Facebook will likely to continue to search for new ways to fight ad blockers, and with more and more users accessing the site through mobile, the company is probably not wringing its hands over a small fraction of users being able to avoid its ads.

Image courtesy of AdBlock Plus