Parents have spent years trying to keep their kids off social media, leading some children to seek refuge in an unexpected place: NPR. On this week’s episode of “This American Life,” host Ira Glass shares the story of the team behind NPR’s podcast “Wild Card,” who noticed a surge of perplexing comments under their Spotify episodes last fall.
Discovery of Unusual Comments
A producer initially assumed that the strange abbreviations and indecipherable emojis were the result of bot traffic and shared screenshots in NPR’s Slack. They subsequently reported the posts to Spotify. However, Hannah Chin, an audio producer and Gen Z colleague, quickly recognized that these comments were not from bots. Instead, they were likely from middle schoolers who were too young for social media, effectively running a group chat in the comments section of the podcast.
