Meta's latest transparency filing under the EU's Digital Services Act put a number on something European marketers have suspected for a while: Instagram is now comfortably the bigger platform in the region, and the gap is widening.
For the first half of 2026, Instagram counted 297 million active users in the EU. Facebook counted 264 million. Both are enormous. Only one is still growing.
Flat is the operative word
Facebook's EU usage has been roughly level for several reporting periods, and has slipped in some of them. Instagram's line has climbed steadily and is on course to cross 300 million in the region sometime next year.
Threads, for reference, now reports 41 million EU users — a modest slice of the more than 500 million monthly actives it claims globally, but real numbers for a platform that's barely three years old.
The DSA requires very large platforms to publish this data twice a year, along with content moderation figures. It's one of the few places where Meta's regional user counts are stated rather than estimated, which is why the reports get read closely.
What it means if you're buying reach
If your budget is aimed at the EU, Instagram is where the audience is trending, and the trend has been consistent long enough to plan around. That doesn't make Facebook irrelevant — 264 million people is not a rounding error, and for older demographics and community-group behaviour it remains the stronger environment. But the default assumption that Facebook is the reach platform and Instagram is the brand platform no longer matches the data in this market.
The broader read is that time is moving to video-first feeds. Instagram and TikTok have absorbed attention that used to sit on Facebook, and the DSA numbers are one of the clearer confirmations of that shift.
The moderation numbers deserve their own look
Meta reported roughly 5,900 EU moderation staff as of this filing, down from about 7,700 in March. That's a cut of nearly a quarter in a matter of months, and it aligns with plans the company has previously outlined to lean more heavily on AI-powered moderation systems.
Set against that, the content-report figures are mixed and hard to read cleanly. On Instagram, reports of terror-related content rose about 38% versus the second half of 2025, and reports of child sexual exploitation material rose about 22%. On Facebook, reports fell across the board — hate speech down about 19%, spam down about 27%, bullying and harassment down about 30%, child exploitation material down about 17%.
The tempting conclusion is that Facebook got safer. The more careful one is that Facebook got quieter. Report volumes track usage, and Facebook's usage in the region is flat to declining. Fewer reports on a shrinking platform is not the same as less harm per user.
Instagram's increases point the other way, and they arrive while the human moderation headcount reviewing them is falling. Whether AI systems close that gap is the question the next filing, six months out, will start to answer.
Image: Sanket Mishra, via Pexels
