Middle schoolers turn NPR's comments into a group chat

Parents trying to keep middle schoolers off social media may want to add public radio to their list of platforms to watch. Producers behind NPR’s podcast “Wild Card” noticed a wave of baffling comments under the show’s Spotify episodes last fall — strings of abbreviations and emojis that, at first glance, looked like automated spam. A producer assumed the posts were bot traffic, shared screenshots internally on Slack, and reported them to Spotify.

Hannah Chin, an audio producer on the team, looked at the same screenshots and recognized something different: the comments were coming from middle schoolers who were too young for mainstream social apps and had found a workaround — running a group chat inside the comment section of a podcast episode. NPR had seen the pattern before: kids used the same trick on the network’s TED Radio Hour show the previous year.

The story surfaced publicly this week when Ira Glass, longtime host of “This American Life,” recounted it on the show, after tracking down one of the kids involved to ask why they had picked NPR. The answer was straightforward: “Um, I think we just, like, looked for podcasts that didn’t have many comments.” Glass, who has hosted “This American Life” for three decades, said hearing that stung a little, given that it meant his own show counted as a quiet corner of the internet.

Why it matters

It’s a reminder that platform age limits are only as good as where enforcement teams look — kids will keep finding overlooked corners of the internet, including ones adults assume are too dull to host anyone but grown-ups.