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Due to increasing criticism from the public regarding their deliberately addictive interfaces, social media sites Facebook and Instagram will now be adding dashboards and other tools to help you track and manage your account usage. Worries about “overdosing” on social media have been becoming serious concerns in recent history, and Facebook and Instagram are convinced their newest additions will help mitigate that problem. Among other new features, you will be able to set reminders to notify you when you’ve spent too much time scrolling as well as view your personally calculated average time spent on the app.
The update will be located under “Your time spent on Facebook” on Facebook and “My activity” on Instagram. Screenshots of what the new features will look like can be viewed here and the features are expected to officially roll out within the next couple of week.
How To Use Features On Facebook And Instagram
On Facebook, tap the button with three vertical lines (the hamburger menu), which is located in the bottom right corner of the app if you’re using it on your phone. You can then scroll down the menu until you find the “Your time on Facebook option.”
On Instagram, tap the settings menu represented by the gear icon on your profile and scroll until you see the “My activity” option.
You will then be met with a bar graph denoting how much time you have spent in the app over the course of the week. You can click on each bar to see the precise amount of time you’ve spent if you’re curious. Next, you can choose between different 5-minute usage intervals according to how much time you wish to spend on the app, selecting the one that best fits your social media consumption. As soon as you’ve hit your selected time, you’ll be sent a notification reminding you to take a break.
You can still keep using the app of course, just like hitting “snooze” on your alarm clock.
Finally, Instagram and Facebook are equipping their sites with an option to mute notifications for certain periods of time. Before you were allowed to mute notifications, but now you will be able to decide for how long you want your notifications muted.
Ameet Ranadive, an Instagram employee leading a team of researchers dedicated to the user’s well-being, asserted that “It’s really important for people that use Instagram and Facebook to feel like the time that they spend with us is time well spent. That’s the whole purpose of this release.”
Naturally, the social media sites are aware of the potential damage these releases could have on their revenue but say they remain committed to encouraging a healthy lifestyle.
Said Ranadive, According to The Verge, “We want to empower people to make intentional decisions about how much time they spend, and how they want to engage with the app… There may be some trade-off with other metrics for the company. That’s a trade-off that we’re willing to live with. In the long run this is something that’s important for the community, and something we want to invest in.”
