I’m sure y’all heard about the Facebook-Cambridge analytical fracas which eventually led to probing of Mark Zuckerberg by the American senate . Anyway, Mark Zuckerberg has been true to his words, “protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profit“. Recently, Facebook released a new feature to limit how much time people spend on Facebook and Instagram. Hopefully this helps reduce our addictions to both apps and also reduce fraudulent activities.
Facebook also stated that they have a responsibility to help people understand how much time they spend on their platforms so they can better manage their experience, this change to the algorithm of both platforms was prompted by the news about social media damaging users mental health.
The new feature has three functions:
Activity Dashboard: this would enable users to be able to check daily times and average time spent on both apps.
A reminder alert: it allows you set a daily reminder of how much time you’d want to spend on the app and alerts you when you’ve reached your self imposed time but doesn’t log you out of the app. It’s left for you to decide if you want to logout or stay scrolling.
Mute notification(optional): this allows you to mute your notifications for a particular period of time.
How to Find the New Tools
Go to the settings page on either app and select ‘your time on Facebook or your Activity.’
The dashboard is at the top and shows the average time spent.
The option to set up daily reminder is underneath it.
I totally believe this new feature would help encourage and promote a healthy use of both apps and also cause a more responsible use of the platforms. A big thumbs up to the Facebook team.