A trial redesign of user’s news feeds in Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Bolivia, Cambodia, Serbia and Slovakia has been halted after strong criticism.

The experiment – which had been labelled as “downright Orwellian” – saw professional news posts removed from users’ timelines but faced a huge backlash from media organisations, all of whom felt that cutting off residents from legitimate news had the potential to be immensely damaging.

“We constantly try out new features, design changes and ranking updates to understand how we can make Facebook better for everyone,” Facebook’s head of News Feed Adam Mosseri said.

“The Explore Feed was a trial response to consistent feedback we received from people over the past year who said they want to see more from friends and family in News Feed. The idea was to create a version of Facebook with two different News Feeds: one as a dedicated place with posts from friends and family and another as a dedicated place for posts from Pages.

“You gave us our answer: People don’t want two separate feeds. In surveys, people told us they were less satisfied with the posts they were seeing, and having two separate feeds didn’t actually help them connect more with friends and family. We also received feedback that we made it harder for people in the test countries to access important information, and that we didn’t communicate the test clearly.

“We’re acting on this feedback by updating the way we evaluate where to test new products, and how we communicate about them.”

These moves are separate to the global changes made to the News Feed in January that similarly look to reduce public content and promote “meaningful social interactions”.