Beck said the family also had a “massive UK audience” and were excited for the change, but was also quick to point out that they were not against the Australian ban.
“We understand that it’s very important, that there’s young people that are affected negatively from social media,” Beck said.
“We’re not naive to that, it’s just that how it affects us and the way we use social media, where we would get caught up.”
Bec said it was a shame that some young people would be losing platforms they had worked hard to start.
“The world has changed so much now with social media, I think young kids can start making a difference for good and starting businesses and doing all kinds of things at a young age now,” she said.
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Beck said many young people in the creative arts industry used their profiles to connect with other people “almost like an online resume to show their work”.
“It’s really sad for some people that use it for that,” she said.
The mums admit they originally knew nothing about YouTube when Prezley and Charli first expressed an interest in making videos in 2017, and were hesitant to expose their children to such a public domain.
“Prezley and Charlotte came to us and wanted to start a YouTube channel, and we were actually really anti-social media. But they kept asking, and so we decided, ‘OK let’s look into it’. We wanted to know what it was about, if our kids were going to be using it,” they said.
“We saw that it actually wasn’t as negative as we thought, and it was actually a pretty cool creative outlet as well – and they wanted to be actors, they wanted to be on-screen.”
The Empire Family has been contacted for further comment.
Tech giants Snapchat, TikTok and Meta have recently told parliament they will comply with the government’s under-16 ban despite their concerns about the effectiveness of the world-first measure.
“We will comply with the law, even though we believe it has been unevenly applied and risks undermining community confidence in the law,” Snap Inc’s senior vice president of global policy Jennifer Stout told a Senate inquiry examining the laws.
The ban will forbid accounts on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, X and YouTube.
