For many, "new year, new me" includes finding a new job. Scouring sites like LinkedIn and Indeed for opportunities can feel like a full-time role in and of itself. This process could potentially improve moving forward, with LinkedIn announcing its latest feature: Job Collections. 

Basically, instead of searching for a specific industry or role, LinkedIn is using generative AI and large language models to analyze each job posting and categorize it into groups such as IT, pro sports, remote and top startups. Along with saving time, LinkedIn indicates that this feature can benefit people who aren't sure what their next step looks like. The company compares it to Airbnb Experiences — you might not know what you're searching for, but you could find something great. Its success relies significantly on how well it understands you versus wasting your time further sorting through jobs that are completely off base. 

According to LinkedIn, applications have risen 50 percent in the US and 36 percent globally, with 85 percent of working people contemplating changing jobs this year. The number of people searching for a job isn't surprising, given the number of recent layoffs. In the tech industry alone, 2024 has already seen layoffs at Twitch, Google, Meta, Discord and more.  

To use LinkedIn's new feature, simply go to the Jobs tab and click on "Explore with Job Collections." You can now also go to Preferences and choose from things like employment and location type. Then LinkedIn will highlight them in green anytime they appear on a job listing. Plus, if a job isn't exactly what you want but the company is, you can now send them an "I'm Interested" notification right from the listing instead of visiting their profile to do so. 

Facebook was flooded with fake advertisements featuring a deepfaked Rishi Sunak ahead of the UK's general election that's expected to take place this year, according to research conducted by communications company Fenimore Harper. The firm found 143 different ads impersonating the UK's Prime Minister on the social network last month, and it believes the ad may have reached more than 400,000 people. It also said that funding for the ads originated from 23 countries, including Turkey, Malaysia, the Philippines and the United States, and that the collective amount of money spent to promote them from December 8, 2023 to January 8, 2024 was $16,500. 

As The Guardian notes, one of the fake ads showed a BBC newscast wherein Sunak said that the UK government has decided to invest in a stock market app launched by Elon Musk. That clip then reportedly linked to a fake BBC news page promoting an investment scam. The video, embedded in Fenimore Harper's website, seems pretty realistic if the viewer doesn't look too closely at people's mouths when they speak. Someone who has no idea what deepfakes are could easily be fooled into thinking that the video is legit.

The company says this is the "first widespread paid promotion of a deepfaked video of a UK political figure." That said, Meta has long been contending with election misinformation on its websites and apps. A spokesperson told The Guardian that the "vast majority" of the adverts were disabled before Fenimore Harper's report was published and that "less than 0.5 percent of UK users saw any individual ad that did go live."

Meta announced late last year that it was going to require advertisers to disclose whether the ads they submit have been digitally altered in the event that they're political or social in nature. It's going to start enforcing the rule this year, likely in hopes that it can help mitigate the expected spread of fake news connected to the upcoming presidential elections in the US. 

Meta is rolling out a suite of new tools on Instagram that give users more control over how much spam content and bots they will see on their feeds. People will also be told if something they posted is in accordance with community guidelines. The new tools will be introduced gradually in the coming weeks.

Instagram has developed and improved its automated detection system that checks for spam across comments, tags, story views and followers. The moderation systems will flag fake followers and spam-filled content and give users the option to delete those items in bulk to save users time. Any suspected spam or bot account will get filtered into a separate inbox for you to review, and if an account isn’t spam, you can approve a request and they’ll be added to your following list. Otherwise, all accounts will be automatically removed after 30 days. Posts by profiles that get tagged as spam won't appear on the content creators’ accounts unless they get approved. An account holder can view, bulk delete or approve any tag requests flagged by the system.

Instagram will also send in-app notifications if it detects posts that violate its content policies. This follows Instagram’s most recent update that shows when posts are blocked from appearing on the Explore page, which should stop account holders from repeating those mistakes. For Stories though, Instagram said it is still experimenting with hiding views from accounts that the platform deems as spam.

The company already introduced the "Hidden Words" tool in 2021, which hides messages with questionable keywords. In the coming update, Instagram said it will start to edit out suspected spam through the advanced comment filtering tool. The issue of harassment and spam has long been a focal point for Instagram. It has had to deal with bots storming the platform and proliferating sexually explicit content. However, the company needs to strike a balance between policing inappropriate content and allowing for the free exchange of ideas on its platform. Recently, Instagram has faced scrutiny for allegedly censoring pro-Palestinian content amid the ongoing war in the Gaza.

Hannah Shaw, better known as the “Kitten Lady,” teaches people how to care for neonatal cats, and has raised more than $1 million for animal shelters and rescues. Her Facebook page has gained over a million followers since she began making cat content, but she almost lost it all to a social engineering hack that took over access to her Meta business account.

“I built that community for more than a decade. Thinking that I might lose it was pretty devastating,” Shaw said.

Influencers rely on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube for their income. These sites have evolved from side project enablers to the sole source of income for some content creators. However, bad actors have found ways to also take a piece of the piece from those earning an honest living there. Yes, high-level hackers tend to seek entities with deep pockets, targeting them with highly complicated attacks. But much of the cyber criminality today is social engineering jobs, ripping off mid-level creators with much fewer resources than a multinational corporation, but also significantly less technical know-how.

A creator who goes by Hobby Bobbins — who gained a cult following within her niche of vintage clothing restoration — walked me through how all of this happened to her. The attack occurred in almost the exact same steps that led to Shaw’s account takeover. It started with an interview request from an individual going by Rex Hall, who claimed to be a manager for the show “Podcast and Chill with MacG.” This appears to be a real podcast, although no one named Rex Hall seems to be publicly associated with it. (We reached out to the podcasters to determine if they're aware their brand is being used to perpetrate a social engineering scheme and have not heard back.) "Podcast and Chill" is based in South Africa, and according to its Twitter bio, its purpose is in part for "documenting black excellence.” It doesn’t specifically focus on the topics Shaw or Bobbins cover, like animal wellness or vintage clothing. But influencers receive these requests constantly, the podcast hosts had a digital footprint and "Rex" was able to answer any questions that Bobbins had.

The malicious actor asked their targets to hop on a Zoom call for pre-interview prep, including setting up Facebook Live to bring in revenue. “Everything seemed normal at first, the only odd thing was his camera was not on. But even that is not too odd, a lot of people don’t want to be on camera,” Shaw said. After a labyrinth of back and forth over backend settings, the scammer leads their targets to a backend setting called “datasets.” It’s an obscure page, often used to give people admin access to a business account. But victims thought it was a normal part of setting up for Facebook Live because it does include event management options.

Both Shaw and Bobbins pushed back on the request to access datasets and turned off their screen sharing to avoid giving too much away. But the hackers still got in by insisting they help with setup, saying that they needed to view one seemingly innocuous link. In datasets, creators generated a unique URL that the scammers could use to get into the account. “When he captured that direct URL, it basically generated that email invite for him without ever having to access my email without him even needing to know a password or anything,” Bobbins said. “All he had to do was put in the link and accept the invite and then it automatically added his own personal Facebook to my page.”

After gaining access, "Rex" was able to make themself an admin of the page. With that power, they could remove Bobbins’ ability to log in. Support tickets with Meta sent her in circles trying to get her account back. Bobbins’ lost her way to communicate with her 400,000 followers, and hackers deleted years of content she had dedicated her career to making.

The scammers cleaned the page to make room for bogus links that led to ad-filled sites to generate easy revenue. They put in a list of about 100 blocked words so that followers couldn’t flag to each other that the account had been hacked. “Anybody who commented on my page that said ‘stolen’ or ‘hacked’ or ‘scam’ or whatever would be automatically blocked out. So, none of my other followers could see the people who knew that my account was hacked,” said Bobbins. She lost an unknown number of views and “hundreds of dollars” worth of sales each day that her account had been taken over.

Shaw and Bobbins both went to Meta for help, but it was fruitless. “There is zero support for a problem like this with Facebook,” Bobbins said. Resetting her password went nowhere, because it couldn’t change the admin settings that the hackers had changed. When Bobbins finally figured out how to contact the help desk at Facebook with a support ticket, it was closed out “almost instantly” with no help received, she said. In response to our questions about this attack vector or what they’re doing to help creators keep accounts secure, Meta recommended users implement multifactor authentication and report any issues to its support center. But Shaw and Bottoms both have two-factor authentication turned on, and their accounts still got taken over. Meta did, however, introduce better customer service as a feature in its paid verification package earlier this year, another way social media platforms are charging for security features.

Shaw got her account back in about 72 hours from the initial attack by using her following to find a person who could help, but Bobbins wasn’t as lucky. She’s still struggling with access today, over a month since the hack occurred. She briefly got back in and was able to begin manually reuploading her past content. Beyond that, those who accessed the accounts changed location permissions, turned off messaging capabilities, removed her shop from her page, blocked certain followers and took away her $5 per month subscribers. The web of damage became so widespread, Bobbins created a list of the footprints left by the attacker to help others undo the changes. Since the account takeover, Bobbins has struggled to keep access to her account, with unusual flags on seemingly unwarranted copyright violations and other issues kicking her out.

“There’s no extra step that can be taken right now to protect somebody from the thing that I just went through,” Bobbins said. The only prevention for a crime like this is spreading the word, so that others don't fall for the same social engineering trick. That’s why Shaw is helping bring together more than a dozen of other victims of the same scam to minimize damage and call for greater creator security.

Still, there’s no real solution without the platforms creating major change. Platforms should do a better job of quickly investigating complaints from followers because right now the onus is on the page owners to figure it out, said Eva Velasquez, president and CEO of the Identity Theft Resource Center. While there are a lot of prescribed processes for traditional identity theft, like freezing your credit, there aren’t well-defined practices for social media account takeovers because creators are at the mercy of these platforms.

If you stumble upon what appears to be an account takeover as a follower, Velasquez recommends getting in touch with the creator outside of that specific platform to let them know a hack is occurring. Victims of an account takeover can also alert the Internet Crimes Complaint Center about the incident, but there’s not much else they can do. Or, creators can avoid using the platform altogether. “At this moment in time, I don't recommend that anybody accepts Facebook Live interviews,” Shaw said.

Earlier this year, Google announced it would shut down its standalone podcast app in 2024. Since then, the company has started moving podcasts into YouTube and its companion app YouTube Music. As a way to ease the transition, Google will be rolling out a migration tool for its current podcast app users. With the tool, users in the US will be able to move their favorite pod subscriptions from Google Podcasts to YouTube Music, or export them for use in other podcast apps.

In the coming weeks, the migration tool will be available through a banner in Google Podcasts. There are step-by-step instructions on how to use the migration tool in Google's Help Center. The entire process is just four steps and you’ll need to have both Google Podcasts and YouTube Music installed on your device to complete the transfer. After the transfer, Google notes it may take a few minutes for everything to show up in your YouTube Music library.

Google's move to ditch its standalone podcast app doesn't come as a total surprise. Google Podcasts has been around since 2018 but it never quite took off like similar apps, including Overcast and Spotify. And YouTube is already a popular destination for podcast fans, with a recent study claiming over 23 percent of podcasts listeners use YouTube as their primary player. Many of today's trending podcasts are already available on YouTube. For podcasts that are not available on the platform, users can add shows directly to their YouTube Music library via RSS feed. This isn't Google's first rodeo. Back in 2020, the company nixed its standalone music app, Google Play Music, in favor of YouTube Music, and it also offered a comprehensive tool to transfer libraries to the new app.

Google Podcasts will remain live for listening through March 2024, after which users will be able to migrate or export their subscriptions through July 2024.

Content creation experts Streamlabs has partnered with beleaguered social media platform X to offer a “seamless go-live experience”. This is part of X’s long-promised integration of game streaming to the site. To that end, it’ll allow X users to initiate streams without having to manually input stream keys and it’ll let those same users sign into the Streamlabs desktop app or the mobile app using social media credentials.

The system also integrates with X’s new live broadcast chat functionality, so you can monitor chat messages in the Streamlabs desktop add as you stream. The desktop app also lets you adjust monetization options on the fly, including custom alerts for tipping and overlays for branded content. Additionally, content creators have access to the Streamlabs merch store so they can hawk branded products while they stream. Creators using X will also have access to the company's line of widgets for increased engagement.

For regular users, this partnership will allow people to chat with their favorite streamers in real-time straight from X, though this feature looks to be paywalled behind one of those Blue subscriptions, or Premium or whatever it’s called these days. The one that gets you the universally-beloved blue check mark.

Of course, there’s the massive antisemitic elephant in the room. This is a strange time to announce a partnership with X, given Musk’s recent behavior and the ongoing exodus of advertisers from the social media platform. So far this exodus has included Apple, Disney, Paramount, Sony, Warner Brothers Discovery and others. It looks like Streamlabs, and by extension Logitech, has decided to buck trends and tie its horse to the X wagon. Still, new livestreaming tools are never a bad thing. 

Meta has launched a standalone version of its image generator as it tests dozens of new generative AI features across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The image generator, called Imagine, was first previewed at the company’s Connect event in November and has been available as part of Meta’s AI chatbot.

Now, with its own dedicated website at imagine.meta.com, the tool will be available outside of the company’s messaging apps. Like other generative AI tools, Imagine allows users to create images from simple text prompts. Imagine, which relies on Meta’s Emu model, will generate four images for each prompt.

The images all have a visible watermark in the lower left corner indicating they were created with Meta AI. Additionally, Meta says it will soon begin testing an invisible watermarking system that’s “resilient to common image manipulations like cropping, color change (brightness, contrast, etc.), screen shots and more.” For those interacting with the image generator in Meta’s messaging apps, the company also introduced a new “reimagine” tool, which allows users to tweak existing images created with Meta AI in chats with friends.

Interestingly, the standalone site for Imagine requires not just a Facebook or Instagram login, but a Meta account, which was introduced earlier this year so VR users could use Quest headsets without a Facebook login. It’s unclear for now if Meta planning an eventual virtual reality tie-in for Imagine, but the company has recently used its new generative AI tools try to breathe new life into its metaverse.

Meta is also testing dozens of new generative AI features across its apps. On Instagram, the company is testing the ability to convert a landscape image to portrait in Stories with a new creative tool called “Expander.” On Facebook, generative AI will also start to show up in places like Groups and Marketplace. Meta is also testing AI-generated writing suggestions for Feed posts, Facebook Dating profiles as well as AI-generated replies for creators to use in replies to Instagram direct messages.

With the latest changes, Meta is also making its 28 celebrity-infused chatbots available to all users in the United States. The company says it will test a new “long-term memory” feature for some of its AI characters so that users can more easily return to previous chats and pick up the conversation where they left off. The chatbots are available in Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp.

The updates highlight how Meta has sought to make generative AI a core part of its service as it tries to compete with the offerings of other AI companies. Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this year that the company would bring gen AI into “every single one of our products.”

YouTube recently took dramatic action against anyone visiting its site with an ad blocker running — after a few pieces of content, it'll simply stop serving you videos. If you want to get past the wall, that ad blocker will (probably) need to be turned off; and if you want an ad-free experience, better cough up a couple bucks for a Premium subscription.

Although this is an aggressive move that seemingly left ad blocking companies scrambling to respond, it didn’t come out the blue — YouTube had been testing something similar for months. And even before this most recent clampdown, the Google-owned video service has been engaged in an ongoing conflict — a game of cat-and-mouse, an arms race, pick your metaphor — with ad-blocking software: YouTube rolls out new ways to serve ads to viewers with ad blockers, then ad blockers develop new strategies to circumvent those ad-serving measures.

As noted in a blog post by the ad- and tracker-blocking company Ghostery, YouTube employs a wide variety of techniques to circumvent ad blockers, such as embedding an ad in the video itself (so the ad blocker can’t distinguish between the two), or serving ads from the same domain as the video, fooling filters that have been set up to block ads served from third-party domains.

It’s not that YouTube is alone in these efforts; many digital publishers make similar attempts to stymie ad blockers. To some extent, YouTube’s moves just get more attention because the service is so popular. As AdGuard CTO Andrey Meshkov put it in an email, “Even when they run a test on a share of users… the number of affected people is very high.”

At the same time, according to Ghostery’s director of product and engineering Krzysztof Modras, it’s also true that “as one of the world’s largest publishers, YouTube constantly invests in circumventing ad blocking.” And that those investments have been effective. Many of the most common ad blocking strategies, including DNS filtering (filtering for third-party domains), network filtering (which Modras described as “more selective” and better at blocking first-party requests) and cosmetic filtering (which can blocks ads without leaving ad-shaped holes in the website content) no longer work on the site.

Now, Modras said, YouTube seems to be “adapting [its] methods more frequently than ever before. To counteract its changes to ad delivery and ad blocker detection, block lists have to be updated at minimum on a daily basis, and sometimes even more often. While all players in the space are innovating, some ad blockers are simply unable to keep up with these changes.”

Keeping pace with YouTube will likely become even more challenging next year, when Google’s Chrome browser adopts the Manifest V3 standard, which significantly limits what extensions are allowed to do. Modras said that under Manifest V3, whenever an ad blocker wants to update its blocklist — again, something they may need to do multiple times a day — it will have to release a full update and undergo a review “which can take anywhere between [a] few hours to even a few weeks.”

“Through Manifest V3, Google will close the door for innovation in the ad blocking landscape and introduce another layer of gatekeeping that will slow down how ad blockers can react to new ads and online tracking methods,” he said.

For many users, the battle between YouTube and ad blockers has largely been invisible, or at least ignorable, until now. The new wall dramatically changes this dynamic, forcing users to adapt their behavior if they want to access YouTube videos at all. Still, the ad blocking companies suggest it’s more of a policy change than a technical breakthrough — a sign of a new willingness on YouTube’s part to risk alienating its users.

“It's not that YouTube's move is something new, many publishers went [down] this road already,” Meshkov said. “The difference is [the] scale of YouTube.” That scale affects both the number of users impacted, as well as the number of resources required to maintain these defenses on the publisher's side. “Going this road is very, very expensive, it requires constant maintenance," he added, "you basically need a team dedicated to this. There's just a handful of companies that can afford it."

As ever, ad blockers are figuring out how to adapt, even if it’s requiring more effort from their users, too. For example, Modras noted that “throughout much of October, Ghostery experienced three to five times the typical number of both uninstalls and installs per day, as well as a 30 percent increase in downloads on Microsoft Edge, where our ad blocker was still working on YouTube for a period of time.” All of this activity suggests that users are quickly cycling through different products and strategies to get around YouTube’s anti-ad block efforts, then discarding them when they stop working.

Meanwhile, uBlock Origin still seems to work on YouTube. But a detailed Reddit post outlining how to avoid tripping the platform's ad-block detection measures notes that because “YouTube changes their detection scripts regularly,” users may still encounter the site’s pop-up warnings and anti-adblock wall in “brief periods of time" between script changes (on the platform's end) or filter updates (on uBlock's side.) uBlock Origin may also stop working on Chrome next year thanks to the aforementioned Manifest V3. And if you’re hoping to use it on a non-Chrome browser, Google has allegedly begun deprecating YouTube's load times on alternate browsers, seemingly as part of the anti-ad block effort. While 404 Media and Android Authority, which both reported on this issue, were not able to replicate these artificially slowed load times, users were seemingly able to avoid them through the use of a “user-agent switcher,” which disguises one browser (say, Firefox) as another (in this case, Chrome).

Why do some ad blockers still work? The answer seems to boil down to a new approach: Scriptlet injection, which uses scripts to alter website behavior in a more fine-grained way. For example, Meshkov said an ad blocker could write a scriptlet to remove a cookie with a given name, or to stop the execution of JavaScript on a web page when it tries to access a page property with a given name.

On YouTube, Modras said, scriptlets can alter the data being loaded before it’s used by the page script. For example, a scriptlet might look for specific data identifiers and remove them, making this approach “subtle enough” to block ads that have been mixed in with website functionality, without affecting the functionality.

Scriptlet injection also plays a role in an increasingly crucial part of the ad blocker’s job: escaping detection. AdGuard’s Meshkov said this is something that teams like his are already working on, since they try escape detection as a general rule — both by avoiding activity that would alert a website to their presence, and by using scriptlets to prevent common fingerprinting functions that websites use to detect ad blockers.

Scriptlet injection seems to be the most promising approach right now — in fact, Modras described it as currently “the only reliable way of ad blocking on YouTube.”

Meshkov said that assessment is accurate if you limit yourself to browser extensions (which is how most popular ad blockers are distributed). But he pointed to network-level ad blockers and alternative YouTube clients, such as NewPipe, as other approaches that can work. A recent AdGuard blog post outlined additional other steps that users can try, such as checking for filter updates, making sure multiple ad blockers aren't installed and using a desktop ad-blocking app, which should be harder to detect than an extension. (AdGuard itself offers both network-level blocking and desktop apps.)

At least one popular ad blocker, AdBlock Plus, won’t be trying to get around YouTube’s wall at all. Vergard Johnsen, chief product officer at AdBlock Plus developer eyeo, said he respects YouTube’s decision to start “a conversation” with users about how content gets monetized.

Referencing the now independently run Acceptable Ads program (which eyeo created and participates in), Johnsen said, “the vast majority of our users have really embraced the fact that there will be ads [...] we’ve made it clear we don’t believe in circumvention.”

Similarly, a YouTube spokesperson reiterated that the platform’s ads support “a diverse ecosystem of creators globally” and that “the use of ad blockers violate YouTube’s Terms of Service.”

As the battle between YouTube and ad blockers continues, Modras suggested that his side has at least one major advantage: They’re open source and can draw on knowledge from the broader community.

“Scriptlet injection is already getting more powerful, and it’s becoming harder for anti-ad blockers to detect,” he said. “In some ways, the current situation has spurred an arms race. YouTube has inadvertently improved ad blockers, as the new knowledge and techniques gained from innovating within the YouTube platform are also applicable to other ad and tracking systems.”

But even if most users grow frustrated with the new countermeasures and decide to whitelist YouTube in their ad block product of choice, Modras suggested that ad blockers can still affect the platform's bottom line: “If users disable ad blocking on only YouTube and maintain their protection on other websites as they browse, the platform will quickly learn that they are still unable to effectively target ads to these users,” since it won’t have data about user activity on those other sites.

Regardless of what YouTube does next, he suggested that other publishers are unlikely to build a similar wall, because few if any services enjoy the same chokehold on an entire media ecosystem — not only owning the most popular video sharing service, but also the most popular web browser on which to view it. "YouTube is in a unique position as it is de facto a monopoly," he said. "That's not true for most of the other publishers.”

Even against those odds, ad block diehards aren't dissuaded in their mission. As Andrey Meshkov put it bluntly: “YouTube’s policy is just a good motivation to do it better.”

Content platform Substack just released a spate of new video capabilities, placing it in direct competition with YouTube and Patreon, among others. The video tools include a direct upload option, which is handy, and customizable paywalls for content creators. Before this, users were forced to upload videos to YouTube and embed a link. The upload tool is now readily accessible via the dashboard. It’ll even automatically split the audio and video for podcasters who want to court both audiences. 

As for the paywall options, you now get the same level of flexibility available to non-video users. Content creators can select a slice of the video to give away for free, locking the rest behind a paywall. The free preview segment should transition smoothly into a prompt to become a paying subscriber.

There’s also a new AI tool that generates transcripts from videos, for those who like to, gasp, read. The transcript is automatically created alongside the video upload and users can post it to the main feed. Additionally, viewers can click anywhere on the transcript to jump to that section of the video.

Video sharing has gotten a much-needed upgrade. Viewers can create their own custom clips sourced from any video. This creates a shareable link that includes branded visuals at the end featuring the creator’s logo and URL, so there will be no obvious thievery. Obviously, viewers can quickly share links to the entire clip if they want. Users can even directly download videos for publication on services like TikTok and Instagram. Again, that bumper will be there to give credit to the original creator.

The company wrote in a blog post that these new tools, taken together, make it so “the friction in starting a media business based on video has been reduced to almost zero.” To commemorate the launch, Substack is rolling out a number of exclusive video shows. There’s a food culture program with chef Nancy Silverton, a talk show starring actress Amber Tamblyn and a news program anchored by Chris Cuomo, among many others.

Substack has certainly been busy adding new features. The platform recently unveiled a Twitter-esque feature called Notes and last year launched a chat feature to make it more of a social space.

Some YouTube viewers who use Firefox or Edge instead of Chrome have reported having to wait around five seconds every time they try to load a video. In screen recordings shared on Reddit and other online forums, users show how their screen goes blank for a short period when they click on a YouTube video before the page loads. But when they switch to Chrome, that waiting period seemed to be non-existent. Android Authority and 404media, which reported on the users' complaints, weren't able to replicate the phenomenon. We also didn't notice any difference in loading times when we accessed YouTube on different browsers. 

Based on the code found by some YCombinator and Reddit posters, YouTube has implemented an anti-adblocker mechanism that's causing the delays. We did find the snippet of code cited in those threads, but it's not quite clear what it does. In a statement that Google has provided Android Authority, it admitted that it has implemented a system that's meant to urge viewers to uninstall their ad blockers. The company said that users who have ad blockers installed "may experience suboptimal viewing" no matter what browser they choose to use

"To support a diverse ecosystem of creators globally and allow billions to access their favorite content on YouTube, we've launched an effort to urge viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium for an ad free experience," the spokesperson said. "Users who have ad blockers installed may experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using."

YouTube started cracking down on ad blockers earlier this year, but it went all out earlier this month when it prevented viewers around the world from watching videos unless they disable their apps, add-ons and extensions. The video hosting website is hoping to entice users who couldn't stand watching ads to subscribe to its $14-a-month YouTube Premium service. Multiple ad-blocking companies have since reported experiencing an elevated number of uninstallations per day since then, but Google has yet to reveal whether YouTube Premium subscriptions have also gone up as a result.