Middle Schoolers Hijack NPR Podcast Comment Section as Group Chat

Blocked from mainstream social platforms, middle schoolers transformed the Spotify comment section beneath an episode of NPR's Wild Card into an improvised group chat. The phenomenon is examined in a new episode of This American Life, where host Ira Glass investigates how the children found and colonized the space. One participant explained the choice simply: they searched for podcasts with few existing comments, a remark Glass admitted stung. Showrunner Dave Blanchard initially mistook the messages for bot activity, describing them as clipped, weird, incoherent, and saturated with emoji and shorthand. He deleted the posts, prompting an account to protest, so it deleted my com. Blanchard then circulated screenshots in NPR's Slack. Producer Hannah Chin identified the behavior as youthful, recalling her own childhood habit of using Google Docs to converse with friends. A comparable incident occurred last year involving Ted Radio Hour. The story was reported by Terrence O'Brien for The Verge under the Internet Culture section.