Australian YouTube stars announce move to UK to avoid coming social media ban

Australian YouTube stars Beck and Bec Lea are packing up their family and heading to the UK to avoid the nation’s coming social media ban that would affect their channel.

The “Empire Family”, who live in Western Australia, have nearly 1.8 million subscribers, but their eldest child, Prezley, 17, has more – a whopping 2.8 million on his YouTube channel alone.

Their youngest child, Charli, 14, has a TikTok account managed by her parents with nearly 300,000 followers as well as a YouTube channel with just under 550,000 subscribers.

It is her accounts that would be affected once the social media ban is introduced on December 10 for children and teenagers under the age of 16.

In a video posted to their main family channel, the Leas discussed their decision to pack up and leave and said they had made the decision because they were using social media “for good”.

“They haven’t defined it exactly, of how it’s going to work yet, but at the moment no under 16s are allowed to have social media,” Beck said.

“It’s like a protective thing, and we understand that it is protecting young people from harm on the internet, but we use the internet for good.

“We have dual citizenship and British passports, and we’ve been wanting to travel for a while, so now we can go to the UK – we can still use our social medias, Charlotte (Charli) can still use her social medias.

“Prez is over 16, but it just kind of covers us while Australia figures out the logistics of that rule because I think there’s going to be a lot of hiccups and a lot of ups and downs.”

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 that 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.

Beck said many young people in the creative arts industry used their profiles to connect with other people – “almost like an online résumé 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.

It’s unclear whether Discord and Roblox will be covered by the ban.

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