Middle Schoolers Turn NPR Podcast Comments Into a Secret Group Chat

Some middle schoolers who are too young for social media have found an unlikely place to hang out online: the comment sections beneath NPR podcasts on Spotify.

The story surfaced on a recent episode of This American Life, where host Ira Glass described how the team behind NPR’s “Wild Card” podcast began noticing strange comments filled with abbreviations and emojis.

At first, a producer suspected bot traffic and reported the posts to Spotify. But Hannah Chin, an NPR audio producer and Gen Z colleague, quickly recognised the pattern as something more familiar: a group chat run by middle schoolers.

Kids found a low-traffic corner of the internet

The apparent appeal was simple. One of the children told Glass they had looked for podcasts with few comments, giving them a relatively quiet place to talk without attracting much adult attention.

The behaviour was not entirely new. Kids had previously been spotted using podcast comments in similar ways, including on NPR’s TED Radio Hour, according to earlier reporting by Techdirt.

For parents who have tried to keep younger children away from mainstream social platforms, the episode shows how kids can repurpose almost any interactive corner of the internet into a social space, even one attached to public radio programming.

Glass took the discovery with some humour. After hearing that the kids chose NPR partly because its podcast comment sections were relatively empty, he joked that the explanation was a little painful for a longtime public radio host to hear.