Kids turned the comment section of an NPR podcast into a group chat

Middle schoolers, likely blocked from other apps and social networks, apparently turned the Spotify comment section under an episode of NPR’s Wild Card into an impromptu group chat. In a new episode of This American Life, host Ira Glass digs into how the kids landed there and why. But it mostly boils down to kids getting creative to work around the restrictions placed on them.

When Glass asked one of the kids why they picked this particular podcast, they said, “We just, like, looked for podcasts that didn’t have many comments.” Which, obviously, hurt Glass’s feelings a bit.

Initially, 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. So he deleted them. Then one of the accounts posted, “so it deleted my com.” So 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,” demonstrating just how resourceful kids can be when cut off from traditional social media.

A similar thing happened last year with Ted Radio Hour.