New Delhi: A bizarre stream of comments on the NPR’s Wild Card podcast left the organisation confused, until a Gen Z employee decoded its mystery. This American Life host Ira Glass recounted what happened.
The US’s National Public Radio staff initially thought the odd comments were by bots, but it turned out to be children, using the comments section for an entirely different reason.
“Aw ok mh,” “Gilgamesh quit, and I’m crying,” and “Last Friday, I broke up with my gf,” read some of the comments.
These posts, said Glass, “seemed to be talking to each other.”
This led the Wild Card producer to believe they were bots, but “some kind of newfangled bots that he had never seen before,” Glass added.
The producer then reported these comments to Spotify, which ended up deleting the posts.
Glass was making a promotional clip for his upcoming episode of the This American Life podcast, which unpacks the mystery of these comments.
The mystery decoded
It took someone 10 years younger on the NPR staff–“Gen Z, not millennial,” notes Glass—to figure out what was really going on.
“These are kids, not bots,” Gen Z staffer Hannah Chinn clarified.
The explanation was simple, Glass later found out. The children, too young to be on social media, were using the comments section of a low-traffic NPR show on Spotify to talk to each other.
Glass reached out to one of them, asking them why they had chosen NPR to talk to each other.
“Um, I think we just looked for podcasts that didn’t have many comments,” the child responded.
“I tell you, buddy, I do a public radio show, and that hurts a little to hear it,” Glass joked. “Sorry,” the child responded.
Not a new phenomenon
NPR had observed a similar phenomenon taking place in the comments sections of episodes of the TED Radio Hour, while self-monitoring the show. Children had earlier too, descended on its comments section to have conversations with each other, completely unrelated to the show.
This phenomenon comes amid increased parental monitoring of their children’s social media usage. Staffers from NPR floated the possibility that children use Spotify because it likely did not fall under the list of sites prohibited by their schools or parents.
The comments section provided them a “third space” that operates as a hidden chat room and remains largely unmonitored.
Purvi Rajpuria is an alum of ThePrint School of Journalism, currently interning with ThePrint.
(Edited by Insha Jalil Waziri)