Middle schoolers found a secret hangout — in NPR's comment section

Longtime "This American Life" host Ira Glass shared an unusual story on his show's latest episode: the team behind NPR's podcast "Wild Card" noticed a wave of confusing comments appearing under their episodes on Spotify last fall.

At first, a producer assumed the strange abbreviations and hard-to-decipher emoji strings were bot activity and shared screenshots in NPR's internal Slack. The team even reported the posts to Spotify as suspicious.

A colleague spots the truth

But Hannah Chin, an audio producer and member of Gen Z, immediately recognized what was really going on. These weren't bots — they were likely middle schoolers too young for social media, using the comment section as an improvised group chat.

Notably, this wasn't the first time it happened at NPR: a similar pattern had been spotted the previous year in the comments of "TED Radio Hour."

Why NPR of all places?

When Glass tracked down one of the kids to ask why they picked this particular podcast, the answer was refreshingly blunt — they simply looked for podcasts with few comments, so their chat wouldn't be noticed. Glass, who has hosted the show for three decades, admitted the answer stung a little, given what it implies about public radio's reach among young audiences.