Technology
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Yes. Scroll to the bottom of the article. The ads all look like related stories (“sponsored content” section on verge). That’s how most sites do it too, and actually most are way worse and look more like related news without any sponsored content indication.
It’s nothing new. It’s as normal as google putting sponsored ads as the first page of results, which look like search results and also can’t be blocked or reported.
These were blocked successfully by blokada (didn't even need pihole for them). Unfortunately it's a subscription on iOS, but it's still free on android!
These look to be the culprit: z.moatads.com, cdn.concert.io, api.parsely.com, ak.sail-horizon.com, static.narrativ.com, syndication.twitter.com, www.googletagmanager.com
Those were blocked by my current lists, and no weird ads appeared on that page; I hope this helps!
Any idea how to block ads in the Twitter Android app? Or, rather, which sites to block? I'm using AdGuard to block ads on all apps, but it doesn't seem to affect the Twitter app. Either the Twitter app runs ads differently or the ads aren't part of any of the blocklists.
The twitter ones are really hard, because I think they're interstitial with the actual twitter content. I haven't used the platform in ages, either, but I think they come form the same domain as the rest of the content.
To see if that's the case, you could close everything, use the app and wait until you get an ad, then check the logs of your ad blocker to see what domains sre being hit. Pick a suspicious one, block it, and try to load the content. You'll break something almost guaranteed, but it's easy to just unblock the domain afterwards
I'm not too sure how adguard works, I've never tried it, but I think it worked on the same concept as pihole etc, by blocking domains. As long as there's a log file, you should be able to fiddle and see if you can block just that ad domain.
Someone with more direct experience will likely have more to say on the matter, of course. This is just the technique I used to block ads on my city's parking app - which I have to put up with AFTER I pay for parking! Heh
Looks like you may be right. Most requests came from api.twitter.com (and variations of that, such as api-33-0-0.twitter.com). The only different one was from global.albtls.t.co, and it was already blocked thanks to Peter Lowe's Blocklist.