Facebook is pretending to care about our screen time by adding new activity trackers

How much screen time do you spend on Facebook or Instagram each day? Do you want to know? Both services are rolling out new dashboards that will tell you how much time you spend inside the apps. The new tools also allow you to set daily limits and tell the app when to mute push notifications.

According to The Verge, the “Your time on Facebook” and “Your activity” on Instagram tools have been designed to “address concerns that addictive feedback loops built into social apps have been detrimental to users’ well-being.”

Once live, the new features on Facebook are accessible when you tap the button with three vertical lines in the button-right corner of the app. Scroll down to “Your time on Facebook” and tap. On Instagram, “Your activity” resides inside the settings menu, which you access by tapping the gear icon on your profile.

On either dashboard, you’ll see a bar chart of the time you have spent in each app over the past seven days. Clicking anywhere on the graph will give you more detailed information.

With regards to the new time limit feature, either app will send you a reminder when you’ve hit your daily limit. However, the app won’t limit your access for the rest of the day. Finally, the new notification settings feature on the dashboard allows you to mute alerts for up to eight hours at a time.

According to Instagram’s Ameet Ranadive,

We want these tools to be widely available to the whole community, and to anyone that would benefit from using them. 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.”

In recent months, there has been a big push to provide wellness tools to mobile device owners by letting them gauge screen time. Apple, for example, plans on releasing a systemwide Screen Time feature this fall. Electronic wellness tools are also being pushed on the Android platform.

Do you think tracking tools for screen time are… worth the time? Let us know below. 

For more tech news, see:

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Bryan M. Wolfe

Bryan considers himself a well-rounded techie, having written articles for MakeUseOf, KnowTechie, AppAdvice, iDownload Blog. When he's not writing, he's being a single dad and rooting for his alma mater, Penn State, or cheering on the Patriots.