In other words this has nothing to do with a return to claimed core values, but a shift in strategy to remain afloat for as long as possible.
I imagine the long term strategy will be to selectively optimize feeds based on user prefs. Not everyone values intimacy and some people prefer BuzzFeed cruft on a daily basis.
Unfortunately intimacy is hard to measure while sharing and content generation makes for easy KPIs for exec to focus on. Focusing on these will treat the symptoms but not the cause. In fact if sharing and recirculation is a KPI then FB will increasingly gravitate toward Twitter.
However this is all backwards. Monetizing the users is a piss poor business model. It fucks up the UX and alienates the users. FB should move to other avenues. Personalized search or ecommerce or premium SMB accounts should be the bigger focus.
Aside, their move into messaging reminds me of Microsoft's play when they leveraged Hotmail users into MSN and virtually overnight, uprooted ICQ/AOL.
Facebook makes money as long as users continue using its services. It doesn't matter much what they are doing as long as they keep coming back.
It shows Facebook has a long term focus which you would expect from a public company.
Advertising has been a huge business for the last 100 years (or more) and it is all going to move online.
The more people deploy adblockers, the more FB makes: (statistically) everyone on mobile access it (and other FB-owned brands) via the app, so they get the revenue of the money that would go to the open web.
The amount of people who have rooted Android devices are probably far lower than the likely-also-low number of people using in-browser ad blockers on Android. For iOS devices, the number of people with jailbroken devices I would guess to be lower in relative percentage than on Android. I don't know if even just in-browser adblocking is possible on iOS at all without jailbreaking.
Anyway, point is, while ad blocking might be relatively wide-spread on the desktop among all people (why else would media bother to spend valuable developer time implementing ad blocker blockers?), in-app ad blocking probably is much less common and that's what fb benefits from.
In general AdBlocking works very well on the open internet with the browser of your choice. However, they're basically non-functional for things happening in-app over HTTPS connections. So, with the majority of FB mobile traffic happening over the dedicated FB app - they are largely immune to blocking AND have a much better set of demographic targeting features.