TECH BREAK: Facebook announces new tools to tackle social media addiction

Social networking giant Facebook has announced new tools to help its users easily control their time on Facebook as well as on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.

The new tools include an activity dashboard, a daily reminder and a new way to limit notifications.

According to Facebook, the tools were developed to ensure the time people spend on the two platforms is "intentional, positive and inspiring."

"It’s not just about the time people spend on Facebook and Instagram but how they spend that time. It’s our responsibility to talk openly about how time online impacts people — and we take that responsibility seriously," said Facebook.

Once the tools roll out, users will be able to access them by going to the settings page on either app and tapping “Your Activity,” on Instagram and “Your Time on Facebook” on Facebook. A dashboard will pop up showing the average usage time on the app.

Users will be able to set daily reminders to help them abide to the limit of usage time they wish to spend on the app for that day.

Users will also have the option of accessing the new “Mute Push Notifications” setting by tapping on “Notification Settings.” According to Facebook, this will limit Facebook or Instagram notifications for the period set by the user. This tool will be ideal for when the user wishes to focus on other things without being distracted by notifications from the apps.

"We developed these tools based on collaboration and inspiration from leading mental health experts and organizations, academics, our own extensive research and feedback from our community," added Facebook.

Once rolled out, these new tools should be able to help the runaway social media addiction among users, on Facebook at least.