How to Check How Much Time You Spend on Facebook and Instagram
There are some harsh truths you'd rather not face, like what you really look like eating a turkey drumstick, or how you sound while you sleep.
Similarly, how many hours you spend on Facebook and Instagram is a potentially shame-inducing data point that for years youve had no real way to assess.But today, Facebook has been widelyand quietlyrolling out a tool that lets you measure how much time you spend using both the Facebook and Instagram apps.
There, youll get a bar graph of the week, with your usage time displayed by hours and minutes per day, and the average amount of time you spent each day.
The Facebook tool in particular has serious limitations, the most glaring of which is that it doesn't factor in desktop usage at all.
Facebook declined to share the data breakdown by device or demographic, but with mobile usage in general higher among younger people, it seems likely that a disproportionate amount of older Facebook users may not be able to effectively track their usage.
It also wont help anyone who may have uninstalled the Facebook app on their phones, but still visit it on the mobile web.
Still, for heavy Facebook app users, the tool should give a good sense of how much time you've sacrificed to the social network.
This year, all the social media and the big consumer tech companies have rolled out similar transparency tools, all with the goal of helping people reclaim their time and use their phones and apps less.
If you use Facebook or Instagram on iOS or a Pixel, you can compare your Facebook's reporting numbers with those of your Screen Time and Digital Well Being reports, which track how long you spend on individual apps.
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