Middle schoolers turned an NPR podcast’s Spotify comment section into a group chat

The answer, according to the report, mostly comes down to kids getting creative to work around restrictions placed on them. When Glass asked one of the kids why they picked that particular podcast, the child said, “We just, like, looked for podcasts that didn’t have many comments.” The response, The Verge noted, obviously hurt Glass’s feelings a bit.

At first, showrunner Dave Blanchard thought the comments were a particularly odd strain of bot. “It was just like gibberish,” he tells Glass in the episode. The posts were “clipped, weird, incoherent,” he said, and loaded with emoji and shorthand. Blanchard deleted them. Then one of the accounts posted, “so it deleted my com.” Blanchard shared screenshots of the comments in NPR’s Slack.

Producer Hannah Chin almost immediately recognized the behavior not as bots but as kids. “I was a kid who used weird parts of the internet not as they were originally designed to talk to my friends,” they said. “I talked back and forth with my friends on Google Docs,” they added, demonstrating how resourceful kids can be when cut off from traditional social media.

The episode traces how a podcast’s comment feature became an improvised chat room for middle schoolers. According to The Verge, the children were likely blocked from other apps and social networks, and they sought out podcasts with few comments as a place to talk.

Editor's Summary

Middle schoolers blocked from other social media used the Spotify comment section under NPR’s Wild Card as an impromptu group chat, according to The Verge. The story, examined on This American Life, shows how kids adapted a podcast comment space into a makeshift messaging platform. NPR staff initially mistook the posts for bots before recognizing them as children.