X 'Paid partnership' posts reportedly vanish on desktop with ad blockers enabled

X rolled out its new “Paid partnership” and “Made with AI” disclosure labels just a day ago, but there’s already a snag. Creators are finding that posts tagged with the “Paid partnership” label simply don’t show up on desktop when an ad blocker is active in the browser.

The issue started getting traction on X after creator @auntiepaca noticed something odd while checking her own sponsored post. The post was labeled “Paid partnership” but was nowhere to be found on her desktop.

After some digging, she traced it back to her ad blocker. “If ‘Paid partnership’ label is on, I can’t see my own post on desktop cuz I have ad block installed,” she wrote, tagging X’s product head Nikita Bier.

Bier quickly picked it up and went straight to @AdblockPlus. “Your ad blocker is hiding people’s own posts from them when they label it as a paid promotion. Please fix,” he wrote in a post. The topic is now trending on X.

The reason this is happening is likely pretty straightforward. When a post carries the “Paid partnership” tag, ad blockers might be reading it as an advertisement and block it from loading, the same way they would with any promoted post or banner ad. So the label meant to keep things transparent is ironically making the content invisible.

Replies under both posts show this is not a one-off thing. Users say it happens across browsers, not just Brave, which has ad blocking built in. Chrome with extensions like Adblock Plus apparently triggers the same problem.

Separately, one user asked: “Say we select the post is paid, now no one can see it with Brave browser and/or browser with ads disabled. What do we do? Legit, what?”

The pushback in the replies is fair, though. “It is an ad right? Paid promotion? They are doing what they intended to do,” one user pointed out. Technically true. But a creator being blocked from seeing their own post is a separate problem, regardless of how ad blockers classify it.

A few temporary workarounds are circulating: opening the post on mobile seems to work fine, and some users say loading the page in Chrome without any extensions active also does the job.

Whether the fix needs to come from Adblock Plus or from X itself is still up in the air. But right now, slapping a “Paid partnership” label on a post might mean your ad blocker treats it the same as a pop-up ad.

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