As pointed out by a Human Rights Watch member (https://twitter.com/NicDawes/status/922622481311166464), they ran the test in countries with recent and/or fragile democracies, where independent media needs every single help possible. All this mess is a fricking disaster.

We saw a fairly significant drop in traffic on our Khmer site http://www.postkhmer.com/ which is mostly driven by Facebook news feed links.

We'll analyse this and comment further if/when we've got something to say.

Edit: realised that this won't make sense for most people. We're the Phnom Penh Post, in Cambodia: http://www.phnompenhpost.com/

Who in their right mind believes 'We’ve heard from people that they want an easy way to discover relevant content from pages they haven’t connected with yet.'

You've heard this from... people working at Facebook?

Just ask in the right way:

- "Do you want to see more interesting content on Facebook?"

- "Do you want a way to discover more relevant pages?"

Anyone have broader context?

I believe it's FB's response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15531823

So, if I understand the context, this means:

"You may have heard an alarming rumor that we were letting people take control of their attention and actually communicate with their friends and family.

"Rest assured that we are doing nothing of the sort.

"It was just an experiment, in countries you might not care about anyway. Keep on clickbaiting."

Facebook inhibits you from communicating with friends and family? Are we talking about the same Facebook?

I pretty much only use Facebook to communicate with my family, but I have to wade through so much distraction, especially articles that people have "shared" or pages that people have "liked" or whatever. It's like a low-quality subreddit. I have to scroll a lot to find things that matter to me on a personal level.

The question was whether Facebook inhibits you from communicating with family and friends. It's a pretty laughable suggestion in my opinion. More specifically, the timeline doesn't even have to be a part of the argument. Facebook Messenger has made it easier to communicate with people, period.

Maybe if Facebook put this new fangled thing called a “hyperlink” in their post there would be some context.

So instead the article just says something about “we ran some tests”. That could mean anything. Did anyone proofread this?

The post doesn't mention that the test is / was also active in India. I've used the feature in FB from India.