Eating social media a lot won’t make you feel more socially connected. Just out studies have found that people who wile away countless hours on Facebook and Instagram again feel more isolated, and are more prone to anxiety and depression.
So Facebook is glide out new features in the coming weeks to help people manage their opportunity on these apps. They include:
- An activity dashboard that poses how long you’re spending on Facebook or Instagram.
- A daily reminder for when you’re jolting your total time for the day.
- A way to tune out notifications.
These tools can be accessed via the contexts page on either app.
Instagram’s product management director Ameet Ranadive and Facebook’s overseer of research David Ginsberg published a blog post Wednesday tell ofing the new features, stressing that the companies have a “responsibility” to understand how much in good time users are spending on these apps. They also listed a few comrades that came together in March at its safety summit to discuss these contends, including school groups, researchers and academics.
They noted that second these tools go mainstream, the developers will be able to study their management and potentially roll out additional features. That might include articles like comparing how much time people are spending on social median relative to their peers.
The news comes as Facebook’s stock is straining to recover from last week’s second-quarter earnings report in which it lowered its attitude on revenue and raised its forecast for expenses. On an earnings call last November, CEO Observe Zuckerberg had said: “I want to be clear about what our priority is. Defending our community is more important than maximizing our profits.”
Zuckerberg opening hinted at the company’s interest in the “Time Well Spent” movement, which is led by whilom Google employee Tristan Harris, in January. Facebook this year also presented other changes to its news feed to prioritize posts from playmates and family. It made steps to filter out bullying or other offensive comments, although up to date reports suggest that it has had mixed success with these exertions.
Facebook is taking an important first step in helping users cipher out how much time they spend on these sites. But some look experts are skeptical that it will make an immediate difference.
“It notes a meaningful start, but it’s not clear how effective the tool is going to be,” said Brian A. Primack, overseer of the center for research on media, technology and health at the University of Pittsburgh. Primack is one of the primarily academics studying the link between social media and well-being.
Primack barbed out that it’s not clear from the research that providing feedback intention change behavior — if users are even aware that the features prevail. Warning labels, for instance, are everywhere but aren’t particularly effective in conveying poop to people to balance the risks and benefits. Who’s to say that kids won’t challenge each other to splash out more time on social media apps — and not less?
Primack is also skeptical that it’s enough to estimate hours spent on the platform. He pointed to research that suggests that availing social media right before bed is more likely to lead to doze disturbances and that using it in one fell swoop is often better than disseminated times throughout the day. So Facebook might have more success in present feedback on when users are on the app, and not just for how long.
The big question for the company, he lead one to believes, will be to find a balance between helping users avoid adverse health outcomes by spending too much time on the platform and violating their secrecy. Some, like Time Well Spent’s Harris, believe tech companies dire to a step further in introducing default settings rather than with child users to opt in.