Ofcom opens investigation into Meta over the Instagram Instants feature

The British communications regulator, Ofcom, announced on Tuesday that it has opened a formal investigation into Meta to determine whether the company breached British online safety laws by failing to properly assess the risks posed by the new “Instagram Instants” feature before its launch in May, as Reuters reports.

“Instants” is the feature that allows content shared on Instagram to disappear after it is viewed. According to Ofcom, the investigation will determine whether Meta carried out “appropriate and sufficient” risk assessments for illegal content and for risks to children before the launch.

George Lusty, Ofcom’s director of enforcement, said that British online safety laws are clear — significant changes to platforms must be assessed for risks BEFORE they are launched: “Safety by design must be built in from the start, not added later,” as quoted by Reuters.

Meta said it takes its regulatory obligations under the Online Safety Act seriously and that it had carried out a risk analysis and had informed Ofcom several times before the launch. The company stresses that “Instants” has built-in protections — blocking of screenshots, resharing and forwarding, no public feed, and “Teen Account” protections enabled automatically — and promised it would cooperate with the investigation.

Context: Meta has already launched legal challenges against Ofcom over the way the Online Safety Act is being enforced — including the scale of information it must provide and the fees — Reuters reports. This investigation is a new, separate development: it is not about yesterday’s legal challenges, but about the risk assessment for a specific feature.