Kids find refuge in NPR comments

Parents have spent years keeping children off social media. Some kids have found an unexpected hiding place: NPR's podcast comment sections, where adults rarely look.

NPR spots strange activity on Wild Card

Last fall, the NPR podcast Wild Card received a flood of baffling comments on Spotify. A producer saw bizarre abbreviations and indecipherable emojis and assumed they were bot traffic.

Hannah Chin recognizes the truth

Audio producer Hannah Chin, a Gen Z colleague, looked at the screenshots and immediately recognized they were not bots. They were middle schoolers running a group chat in the comments.

NPR had seen this before

NPR had spotted kids doing the same thing on the TED Radio Hour show last year. The pattern of middle schoolers using podcast comments as a social space was not entirely new.

Why NPR? Few comments there

When Ira Glass tracked down one of the kids to ask why NPR, the answer was straightforward: they looked for podcasts that did not have many comments, making them ideal for private conversation.

“Um, I think we just, like, looked for podcasts that didn't have many comments.”

Glass reacts to the revelation

Ira Glass, who has hosted This American Life for three decades, responded with gentle disappointment. He told the child, "I tell you, buddy, I do a public radio show, and that hurts a little to hear."

“I tell you, buddy, I do a public radio show, and that hurts a little to hear.”