A wave of comments that appeared beneath episodes of NPR's podcast Wild Card last fall was initially mistaken for automated bot activity, but was in fact the work of middle schoolers using the comment section as a group chat, according to an account from This American Life host Ira Glass.
Producers behind Wild Card noticed the flood of comments under their Spotify episodes. The messages were filled with unusual abbreviations and hard-to-read emojis, leading a producer to conclude that automated accounts were responsible and to share screenshots in NPR's Slack workspace.
The posts were reported to Spotify, but audio producer Hannah Chin, a Gen Z colleague, looked at the screenshots and recognized almost immediately that the messages were probably coming from middle schoolers who were too young to use social media and had set up a group chat in the podcast comments.
NPR had seen children do the same thing on its TED Radio Hour show the previous year. Glass's account suggests the network could have recognized the pattern sooner.
When Glass tracked down one of the children to ask why they had chosen NPR, the answer was blunt. Glass recounted that the child said they had simply looked for podcasts that did not have many comments, a response that led the three-decade host of This American Life to say it stung a little to hear.
The discovery puts a spotlight on a corner of the internet that parents and platforms have generally not treated as a destination for minors. Children who are barred from mainstream social media platforms can still post comments on podcast episodes distributed through services such as Spotify, where the activity drew little attention until NPR staff examined it.
For US technology and media companies, the episode illustrates how features built for audience feedback can be repurposed by young users for social interaction, even when those users are not supposed to be on social apps. It also shows how difficult it can be for platforms and publishers to distinguish coordinated youth activity from automated traffic.
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