Following Instagram’s lead, its parent company Facebook has now started rolling out the “Your time on Facebook” feature to let users know and manage their time spent scrolling through the feed watching cute cat videos.
- To check out this feature, you simply need to open the Facebook app and tap on the ‘More’ tab and scroll down to the ‘Settings & Privacy’ option.
As you can see in the screenshot attached above, Facebook first tells you about the time spent on the platform each day for the last one week. It not only depicts these figures via a graph but also calculates and shows the ‘average time per day’ spent by you on the platform.
You can then scroll down and choose to set a reminder for the ‘amount of time’ you want to spend on the platform, which is similar to time limit features being offered by Apple’s Screen Time and Google’s Digital Wellbeing tools.
While all this is good and Facebook is trying to do its part to curb addiction, I have one major concern with the implementation of this feature. When you open the ‘Your Time on Facebook’ option in the app, you can see at the top that the feature just takes time spent on the device into account.
This is, however, not the correct measure as you could still be spending as much time scrolling through posts on other devices. The social media giant needs to give us a fuller picture of our time spent, with per-device stats, which we expect to see in the near future.
