Liepaja youth choose digital content club

Young people in Liepaja have voted to establish a digital content creation club at the city’s Youth House, with activities scheduled to begin in September, LSM reported.

Youth House director Ance Medne-Strazda said young people differed in their attitudes towards social media but wanted shared activities, workshops and opportunities to learn new skills.

“This is an age when a young person is looking for themselves and needs a sense of belonging,” Medne-Strazda said.

Young content creators often have high visibility, fame and large followings on social media, but building an audience requires serious work and courage. Fear of what others might think is one reason some young people remain viewers rather than posting content themselves.

To learn more about the less visible aspects of the work, young people in Liepaja met experienced content creators Renate Balode and Nikola Zilova. Balode began creating digital content six years ago, documenting her daily life after becoming a mother. She advised aspiring creators to avoid artificiality.

“Every day, someone new starts doing this, and I miss authenticity. Be who you are and put that into the video. Do not fake it,” Balode said.

Zilova, who creates content on TikTok, warned that fame as a digital content creator is unstable.

“There is no stable income in an influencer’s life. I can fall out of the algorithm, and people may lose interest in me. You never know. But I want a stable life. So my dream would not be simply to become an influencer. I like studying and working,” she said.

Participants at the event said they did not currently plan to make content creation their career, although they acknowledged that content created by others played an important role in their lives. Olive Helena Krafte, who attended the Level-up event, said she enjoyed watching content and finding inspiration but did not post because she was afraid of what others might think of her.

In Latvia, the official minimum age for creating an account and using TikTok and Instagram is 13. However, according to the Latvian Safer Internet Centre, 80% of children under 13 already use the platforms by bypassing the existing restrictions. In several parts of the world, authorities are considering restricting access to some popular platforms until the age of 16.