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- Mar 3, 2018
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Back in June, TechCrunch reported that Facebook was working on a feature that tracks the time users spend on the social media platform. Apparently, that feature took some time to develop, as Facebook just rolled it out this week. On the surface, a way to track excessive Facebook usage seems like a good idea, and other social media platforms have been praised for developing similar features. But TechCrunch and other news organizations are calling this particular implementation "toothless". The feature isn't enabled by default, and it only sends an easily dismissible notifications when usage time is exceeded. Devices are not tracked separately, and there's no integration with Instagram.
But the biggest flaw remains that Your Time on Facebook treats all time the same. That seems to ignore the research Facebook itself has presented about digital well-being on social networks, as well as CEO Mark Zuckerberg's comments on what constitutes healthy and unhealthy behavior. Zuckerberg said on the Q1 2018 earnings call "the well-being research that we've done... suggests that when people use the internet for interacting with people and building relationships, that is correlated with all the positive measures of well-being that you'd expect - like longer term health and happiness, feeling more connected and less lonely - whereas just passively consuming content is not necessarily positive on those dimensions." Yet you can't tell active and passive Facebooking apart from the dashboard.
But the biggest flaw remains that Your Time on Facebook treats all time the same. That seems to ignore the research Facebook itself has presented about digital well-being on social networks, as well as CEO Mark Zuckerberg's comments on what constitutes healthy and unhealthy behavior. Zuckerberg said on the Q1 2018 earnings call "the well-being research that we've done... suggests that when people use the internet for interacting with people and building relationships, that is correlated with all the positive measures of well-being that you'd expect - like longer term health and happiness, feeling more connected and less lonely - whereas just passively consuming content is not necessarily positive on those dimensions." Yet you can't tell active and passive Facebooking apart from the dashboard.