Facebook and Instagram are watching us, and they’ve seen how much time we waste on their apps. To try to give us back some semblance of a social media-free life, they’ve announced that they have implemented new time limit settings. Now, if you so choose, you will literally be unable to procrastinate on Instagram for hours at a time.
A blog post on the new features, written by David Ginsberg of Facebook and Ameet Ranadive of Instagram, says that they developed the time limit features “based on collaboration and inspiration from leading mental health experts and organizations, academics, our own research, and feedback from our community.” Their main goal is to promote healthy online habits for teens who may get sucked into the endless content on the platforms.
Ginsberg and Ranadive also stated that they are implementing these new tools because they “want the time people spend on Facebook an Instagram to be intentional, positive, and inspiring,” instead of draining and time-consuming. Seems like they know that some of us feel like keeping up on Instagram is a job. In addition to the ability to limit your daily usage of each app, users will also be able to monitor their time spend on the platforms and mute notifications for set times.
Users can access these tools on Facebook and Instagram now, in each app's settings page under the headers “Your Time on Facebook” and “Your Activity,” respectively.
