The hottest new hangout for middle schoolers is NPR’s comment section?
In Brief
1:33 PM PDT · September 25, 2026
Parents have spent years trying to keep their kids off social media, so some kids headed to the one place no adult would think to look for them: NPR.
On this week’s “This American Life,” host Ira Glass tells the story of the team behind NPR’s podcast “Wild Card,” who noticed a flood of baffling comments under their Spotify episodes last fall. A producer assumed the bizarre abbreviations and indecipherable emojis were bot traffic and shared screenshots in NPR’s Slack. They then reported the posts to Spotify.
But Hannah Chin, an audio producer and Gen Z colleague, took one look at the screenshots and recognized, almost immediately by Glass’s telling, that these weren’t bots. They were likely middle schoolers who were too young for social media, running a group chat in the comments of the podcast. (Perhaps someone at...
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