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When considering how much time we spend on our phones, it’s hard to think of two apps that can be more of a mindless time suck than Instagram and its big brother, Facebook.
As part of a larger trend of tech companies helping to wean us off their more-addictive products, Facebook Inc. FB, -0.54% has announced new tools that tell us more about how much time we’re spending in its apps and give us a nudge when it’s time for a break.
This doesn’t come as a surprise. The company has publicly acknowledged that some social-media use can be harmful. In a January post, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg made it his 2018 goal to “fix” Facebook’s problems, “whether it’s protecting our community from abuse and hate, defending against interference by nation states, or making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent.” Pressure on Facebook to clean things up rose again after the disclosure that analytics firm Cambridge Analytica improperly handled data on tens of millions of users.
This initiative is part of the reason Facebook’s outsize revenue growth has slowed. After reporting its quarterly earnings last week and warning of additional challenges ahead, the company’s stock took a hit.
Read an expanded version of this story at WSJ.com.
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