In an effort to evade parental monitoring of their online activities, some children have turned to an unexpected platform: NPR.
This week on “This American Life,” host Ira Glass shares the intriguing narrative of the “Wild Card” podcast team at NPR, who observed a sudden influx of puzzling comments beneath their Spotify episodes last fall. One producer initially thought these strange abbreviations and unintelligible emojis were automated messages and decided to share the screenshots in the NPR Slack workspace, subsequently reporting the posts to Spotify.
However, Hannah Chin, an audio producer from Gen Z, quickly recognized that these were not automated messages. Instead, as Glass recounts, they were likely middle schoolers, too young for social media, utilizing the podcast comments section as a group chat. (This isn’t the first time such behavior has been noted; similar patterns were observed with children commenting on the TED Radio Hour show the previous year.)
When Glass contacted one of the kids to understand why they chose NPR, the response was refreshingly candid: “Um, I think we just, like, looked for podcasts that didn’t have many comments.”
“I tell you, buddy,” Glass replied, who has been at the helm of “This American Life” for thirty years, “as a public radio host, that stings a bit.”
