Designated alongside Facebook and covered by the same two open Meta proceedings.
- Tier
- VLOP — very large online platform
- Provider
- Meta Platforms Ireland Limited
- Sector
- Social
- Designated
- 25 April 2023
- Obligations from
- 25 August 2023
- EU users at designation
- 259 million
- Formal proceedings
- 2
- Court challenges
- T-55/24 and T-58/24
Designated 25 April 2023 on 259 million average monthly active recipients in the Union.
Instagram is named alongside Facebook in both open Meta proceedings, with the minors proceeding of 16 May 2024 focused on addictive design, rabbit-hole effects and age assurance.
Where Instagram sits in the tier
Designation is not a ranking, and the obligations do not scale with size: the smallest designated service carries exactly the same duties in Articles 33 to 43 as the largest.
Amplification, minors, and civic discourse
For a feed-based platform the Article 34 assessment lands squarely on the recommender system: how ranking and amplification shape what spreads, and whether that design contributes to the dissemination of illegal content or to negative effects on civic discourse and electoral processes.
Article 38 requires at least one feed option not based on profiling, directly accessible from the interface where recommendations appear. Article 27, which applies to all online platforms, separately requires the main parameters of the recommender to be explained in the terms.
Article 28 and the July 2025 minors guidelines add a design layer: default settings for minors’ accounts, age assurance, and features that extend engagement are all in scope, and are the subject of several open proceedings.
- Article 27
- Recommender transparency, applying to all online platforms.
- Article 28
- Protection of minors, including default account settings.
Before the courts
Meta Platforms Ireland and TikTok Technology v Commission — supervisory fees
Meta and TikTok each challenged the Commission’s implementing decisions setting their Article 43 supervisory fees, arguing the methodology produced arbitrary results — most pointedly that keying the cap to group-level net income means a loss-making provider of identical size can owe nothing at all.
The General Court (Extended Composition) annulled the decisions, but on an institutional ground rather than a substantive one. Because the calculation of average monthly active recipients is essential to determining the fee, Article 43(4) required that methodology to be set out in a delegated act. The Commission had used two implementing decisions instead, and that was the wrong instrument.
The Court maintained the effects of the annulled decisions for twelve months, giving the Commission time to re-adopt the methodology in the proper form. The practical result is that the fees stand for now and the machinery gets rebuilt underneath them.
It remains the only successful challenge brought against any part of the DSA’s designated-service regime — and it turned on administrative law, not on whether the tier is justified.
Formal proceedings
Deceptive advertising, civic discourse and researcher data access
OpenOpened 30 April 2024
- ·Deceptive political advertising and coordinated inauthentic behaviour
- ·Deprecation of the CrowdTangle research tool (Article 40)
- ·Notice-and-action and complaint mechanisms
Protection of minors and addictive design
OpenOpened 16 May 2024
- ·Addictive design and rabbit-hole effects on minors (Articles 34–35)
- ·Age assurance methods
- ·Prevention of access by under-13s
Instagram timeline
- 25 April 2023 Designated a VLOP by Commission decision.
- 25 August 2023 Articles 33 to 43 begin to apply, four months after notification.
- 30 April 2024 Formal proceedings opened ahead of the 2024 European Parliament elections.
- 16 May 2024 Formal proceedings opened.
- September 2025 General Court judgment in T-55/24 and T-58/24: annulled.
- 2026 Commission issues preliminary findings that Meta did not provide DSA-compliant mechanisms to report illegal content or challenge moderation decisions. Preliminary findings are not a final decision.
What Instagram has to do
Designation applies the asymmetric obligations in Articles 33 to 43. They are the same for every designated service, read against a platform surface. Terms used on this page are collected in the glossary.
- Article 34 Systemic risk assessment
- Article 35 Mitigation of risks
- Article 37 Independent audit
- Article 38 Recommender systems without profiling
- Article 39 Advertising repository
- Article 40 Data access for the Commission and vetted researchers
- Article 41 Internal compliance function
- Article 42 Transparency reporting
- Article 43 Supervisory fee
Related designations
Also designated under Meta Platforms Ireland Limited: Facebook.
Other social services in the tier: Facebook, Pinterest, X, Snapchat, Reddit, LinkedIn.
Designated on the same day (25 April 2023): Google Search, Bing, YouTube, Google Play, Google Maps, Facebook, Amazon Store, Wikipedia, TikTok, Pinterest, App Store, X, AliExpress, Snapchat, Zalando, Google Shopping, LinkedIn, Booking.com.