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Facebook Rolls Out News Feed Change That Blocks Watchdogs from Gathering Data

• An update to Facebook, which has not yet been rolled out to all users, obfuscates the page content in the markup of the HTML DOM, potentially excluding disabled users. It adds “superfluous text to news feed posts in the form of ARIA tags” (“junk code”) to make it more difficult for people and bots to “scrape” the content, which this article says includes legitimate users such as researchers and journalists.
• These junk characters have made similar moves in the past to reduce the efficiency of ad-blocking software.
• Facebook claims that its new update has been designed not to reduce accessibility. However, the article contains a video demonstrating that the Microsoft Narrator screen reader reads aloud a string of junk characters on at least one occasion.
• There is a dissonance between making content accessible and building in anti-scraping / anti-ad-blocking measures. It’s difficult, impossible even, to do a good job at both.

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