Goal and the limit of two hours

Meta accepting to limit Instagram and Facebook use to two hours daily for minors under 18 in the United States is important news. The agreement with different North American states also includes nighttime restrictions, fewer notifications during school hours, and more age controls. It's a victory that limits are starting to be put in place, but we need to go further.

Social networks are not neutral. A large part of their architecture is designed to retain our attention: the infinite scroll, automatic playback, notifications, algorithmic recommendations, and, above all, social rewards (a like, a comment, a new follower…).

This has a special impact during adolescence. The brain is still maturing and the circuits related to reward and social approval are particularly sensitive, while the systems involved in self-control and emotional regulation are still developing. Therefore, technology designed to capture and retain attention and reward you can be particularly harmful at this stage.

The data indicates that we are not talking about an anecdotal problem. According to the ESTUDES 2025 survey, 15.3% of students aged 14 to 18 in Spain have a potential problematic use of social networks, and other research links social network use with mental health issues.

This does not mean that networks cause depression or anxiety, because the relationship is multifactorial. But it is increasingly evident that they play a significant role in the proliferation of pathologies (of course, the person's characteristics and their context also influence this).

That said, it is clear that the use or non-use of networks is not simply a matter of willpower. And that is why the two hours Meta commits to are a rather irrelevant measure.

This is not just about how long we browse, but about how we do it. It's not the same to spend two hours on your phone talking to friends as two hours comparing ourselves to seemingly perfect lives. It's not the same to create as to consume passively. It's not the same to follow content that interests us and offers us knowledge as to get caught in an infinite succession of random videos. And, above all, it's not the same to leave a network feeling connected and good, as to leave it feeling anxious, sad, or empty.

The time we spend online is an important factor, but it's not the only one. We need to ask ourselves what we do during these hours, what content we consume, with whom we interact, how we feel while doing it, and what we stop doing to stay connected.

This implies educating and not just limiting time. We need digital literacy (for all citizens, not just for the young sector) to understand how algorithms work, recognize attention-grabbing techniques, identify social comparison, set limits on notifications, and detect when a network ceases to be a useful tool and begins to govern our time.

The challenge is not to raise a generation that does not use networks (that would be a utopia), but one that knows how to use them and does not let social networks decide for them.