Middle schoolers use NPR podcast comments as secret chat to avoid social media bans

Parents have spent years trying to keep their kids off social media, so some kids headed to the one place no adult would think to look for them: NPR.

On this week’s “This American Life,” host Ira Glass tells the story of the team behind NPR’s podcast “Wild Card,” who noticed a flood of baffling comments under their Spotify episodes last fall. A producer assumed the bizarre abbreviations and indecipherable emojis were bot traffic and shared screenshots in NPR’s Slack. They then reported the posts to Spotify.

But Hannah Chin, an audio producer and Gen Z colleague, took one look at the screenshots and recognized, almost immediately by Glass’s telling, that these weren’t bots. They were likely middle schoolers who were too young for social media, running a group chat in the comments of the podcast. (Perhaps someone at NPR should have grokked this sooner: it spotted kids doing the same thing on TED Radio Hour show last year.)

As for why NPR in particular, when Glass tracked down one of the kids to ask, he was given the kind of unvarnished answer that a middle schooler would give: “Um, I think we just, like, looked for podcasts that didn’t have many comments.”

“I tell you, buddy,” responded Glass, who has hosted “This American Life” for three decades, “I do a public radio show, and that hurts a little to hear.”