Facebook and Instagram discover the time spent on the social network

Many studies state that a long time spent on social media can be harmful. In response, Facebook and Instagram will now allow the consumer to know the time he spends on his smartphone.

Staying too long in front of a screen can have unpleasant effects. This is also true with social networks, especially as the time spent on them is consistent. Faced with this problem, Facebook and Instagram have put in place a new system. Whatever your smartphone, this new tool could allow you to use it a little less.

Discover the time spent on social media

As expected, the feature allows you to know the time spent each day and week on the application. It also allows you to define directly within the application a time limit to spend daily on the network. Once defined, you will receive an alert that you have reached your “daily quota”.

Facebook also adds shortcuts to access the notifications settings and thus disable push notifications and provides a shortcut to your friend requests. In addition, it will be possible to define via this tab your “newsfeed preferences” ie publications of which friends you want to appear first, the possibility of contacting people you no longer follow or still see hidden applications of the newsfeed.

The feature is being deployed. To access your spreadsheet just click on Settings and Privacy and then “your time on Facebook”. The latter is only available on the Facebook application.

Small point “negative” the tables of Facebook and Instagram are not grouped, which does not allow to have a global overview of the time of use on these platforms.

This announcement comes days after the sad results of a survey that shows that social networks increase depression and loneliness. However, nothing indicates that the addition of these dashboards leads to real awareness on the part of users.

We all know that we spend too much time scrollering our newsfeed, but what do you want, it is a gesture that we repeat daily. We must simply force ourselves to focus on real life and thus not deprive ourselves of important moments to make a picture or a story!

The smart health procedure 

But for all those who already have access, here is the procedure to follow:

Go to the Facebook application (the option is not yet available on desktop and your time spent on facebook.com is not counted)

Click on the menu at the top right of the screenAt the very bottom of the list, choose the “Settings and privacy” menu, then “Your time on Facebook”Facebook will tell you the average time spent each day on your device. It is also possible to turn off the notifications for a small period (between 15 minutes and 8 hours) and set a limit, or as the company calls it, “optimize the time spent on Facebook.” Once the time has been exceeded, the app will send you a notification, but will not prevent you from continuing your session.

The user’s wishes

If we have to remember one thing from the Facebook and Instagram proposal, it’s because it will be based on the user’s wishes. In fact, refusing to listen to the notification that the time is over is not a problem. It is also not possible to simply “forbid” the use of one of the two networks during a given period. In short, the choice to stop will only come back to the person in front of his screen. We can still appreciate the effort on the side of Facebook and Instagram, their new tool can be enough to convince some to reduce their consumption.

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