A procedural question with a revenue-sized penalty
Ofcom opened its first formal investigation into Meta under the UK’s Online Safety Act on 6 October. The subject is Instagram Instants, a feature launched in May 2026 that lets content disappear after it has been viewed. The regulator is examining whether Meta carried out a “suitable and sufficient” assessment of the risks of illegal content on the feature, and of any risks to children, before it went live.
That framing matters. Ofcom is not, at this stage, alleging that Instants has caused harm. It is asking whether the assessment duty was discharged at the right time — before launch rather than after.
“Our online safety laws are clear — significant changes to platforms must be risk assessed before they’re launched,” said George Lusty, Ofcom’s director of enforcement, adding that safety measures should be built in at the design stage rather than bolted on afterwards.
What Meta says it did
Meta’s response is that the work was done. The company said it “conducted a risk analysis and briefed Ofcom about this feature on a number of occasions before launching it”, and pointed to protections built into Instants: blocking screenshots, reshares and forwarding, no public feed, and Teen Account protections applied automatically.
If both accounts are accurate, the dispute is about whether what Meta did meets the statutory standard, not about whether anything was done at all. That is the kind of question the first enforcement cases under a new regime exist to settle.
The exposure is not small. The Online Safety Act lets Ofcom fine a non-compliant service up to £18 million or 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue, whichever is greater. For Meta the second figure is the operative one.
Why this is an AI story
Instants is a disappearing-media feature, and disappearing media is where generated content is hardest to trace. A feature that blocks screenshots and leaves no public feed is also a feature where an AI-generated image is seen once and leaves no artefact for a moderator, a researcher or a regulator to inspect afterwards.
Ofcom has previously opened Online Safety Act investigations into other services, including online suicide forums and file-sharing sites. This is the first aimed at Meta, and the first to test the pre-launch assessment duty against a large platform shipping a new feature at speed.
The thing to watch is the standard Ofcom sets. If “suitable and sufficient” turns out to mean a documented, published assessment covering illegal content and child safety before a launch date, every platform shipping generative features into the UK inherits a new gate — and the shipping cadence the industry has settled into becomes considerably more expensive.
