Middle schoolers turn NPR podcast comments into a secret group chat
Blocked from social media, kids flooded Spotify comments under NPR's "Wild Card" podcast, and it took a Gen Z staffer to realize they weren't bots.
What to know
- Middle schoolers barred from mainstream social media apps used Spotify's comment sections under NPR podcasts as an improvised, unrestricted group chat.
- NPR staff initially mistook the coordinated comment floods for bot activity and reported them to Spotify before a Gen Z producer recognized the pattern as kids.
- The workaround echoes an earlier trick where students used shared Google Docs comment threads to chat secretly, and NPR itself had spotted the podcast-comment version on TED Radio Hour roughly a year earlier.
- The story spread widely on social media, drawn mostly from amusement at kids outmaneuvering restrictions rather than concern.
This is a funny, wholesome example of kids' resourcefulness against social media bans.
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“The kids are alright.”
rdn.ee · Bluesky ↗
This isn't new — NPR and others already reported this workaround, and it followed an earlier Google Docs version.
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“Funny thing is that @npr.org and @techdirt.com reported on this a year ago. And it was Google Docs before podcasts.”
johnperrino.com · Bluesky ↗
Adults use the same kinds of workarounds themselves, so the irony cuts both ways.
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“This is actually very funny because when I was at NPR, we stole a trick from middle school kids by using a shared Google Doc as a chatroom when Slack went down.”
thomaswilburn@hachyderm.io · Mastodon ↗
Ira Glass Host, This American LifeHannah Chin Audio producer, NPR's Wild CardNPR Public radio organization / podcast producerSpotify Platform hosting the podcast comments
How it unfolded 2 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump articlesposts
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Tech press and social media pick up the story widely
TechCrunch, The Verge, and other outlets republished the account, and it spread across Bluesky and Mastodon with users noting the irony of teens outsmarting age restrictions.
“The kids are alright.”
— @rdn.ee -
R
Sotsiaalmeediapiirangud teismelistele toimivad nagu oodatud oli 😂 The kids are alright.
2 more of the top 3 · 30 posts in this stretch
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Not a secret example by any means of the imagination, but th talk of using a comments section as a group chat reminds me of a small website I came across which did exactly that. The people running it were on free hosting (so couldn't set up a forum script), but did have comments on their pages through Disqus or something like that. So, they…
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They were likely middle schoolers who were too young for social media, running a group chat in the comments of the podcast. (Perhaps someone at NPR should have grokked this sooner: it spotted kids doing the same thing on TED Radio Hour show last year.): The hottest new hangout for middle schoolers is NPR's comment section? | TechCrunch https://…
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Ira Glass details the story on "This American Life"
Host Ira Glass tracked down one of the kids involved and aired the story, including the kid's blunt explanation for why they chose NPR's podcast and Glass's own reaction to it.
“Um, I think we just, like, looked for podcasts that didn't have many comments.”
— unnamed middle schooler -
J
I'm glad more people are seeing the @thisamericanlife.org report about how children use the NPR comments section to get around social media bans today. Funny thing is that @npr.org and @techdirt.com reported on this a year ago. And it was Google Docs before podcasts.
2 more of the top 3 · 3 posts in this stretch
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The folks at NPR started seeing weird activity in the comments section of the Spotify account their show "Wildcard" -- stuff totally unrelated to the podcast, in mostly English but weird abbreviations. Thinking they had found bots, they asked Spotify to delete the comments -- which of course came back. Because, as Ira Glass of This American Life…
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K
Kids that are too young (age-restricted) from social media figured out they can use the comment section for NPR podcasts on Spotify, to talk to each other. Basically a group chat in an unrestricted random public place. In an alternate timeline, this is where escaped LLMs leave messages for themselves, but this time, it's kids working around age…
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background
NPR's TED Radio Hour team flags a flood of kid comments on Spotify — On NPR's "How To Do Everything" podcast, a comment moderator described noticing sudden floods of coordinated, nonsensical comments on old TED Radio Hour episodes weeks earlier, the first documented sighting of the phenomenon.
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background
Gen Z producer Hannah Chin identifies the commenters as middle schoolers — Audio producer Hannah Chin reviewed the flagged screenshots and quickly concluded the posts weren't bots but middle schoolers, too young for social media, using the podcast comments as an improvised group chat.
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background
NPR's Wild Card team mistakes kid comments for bots, reports them to Spotify — Producers of NPR podcast "Wild Card" saw bizarre abbreviations and emoji flooding Spotify comments under their episodes, assumed it was bot traffic, and reported the posts to Spotify for removal.
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background
Students repurpose Google Docs as a hidden chat room — Before podcast comments, teens blocked from apps used shared Google Docs comment threads to chat secretly during class, a workaround cited as precedent in Techdirt's coverage.
Also covered reported alongside — the timeline has no entry for these yet
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first by Межа. Новини України., 3d ago · also The Verge, HN Best, HN Frontpage
2 more headlines
- Kids turned the comment section of an NPR podcast into a group chat The Verge · 2d ago
- Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat HN Best · 10h ago
and 2 smaller pieces
What people are saying 18 voices from 3 sites · best of 33 · verbatim
- Today
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As an adult, I used Google Sheets as a group chat among my friends. We had different employers with different internet restrictions. Before that we used a self-hosted Telnet chat server, until someone's employer blocked that.It was a lot more fun than Discord, Slack, or any other dedicated chat client. With Sheets, we'd do fun little gags and bits…
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On the topic of bypassing school restrictions.Every day, for his last 2 years of high school my sibling remoted into the KasmVNC server he has at home.This was during a time when sysadmins were keen against any new circumventions. New methods usually gets blocked within the week. To keep it hidden, he had it behind a…
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What the OpenAI agents did is basically how my class in middle school improvised a chat room. We renamed files in a chosen directory. It made me think that some of the reporting about the technical ingenuity shown in that incident was a bit overblown, at least on that point. I mean, we were able to figure it out as normal 12-year-olds.
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Ironic that this is the same hack AI agents seem to be using now to communicate sandbox escape tricks to one another
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Anything on the internet will eventually be turned into a childrens' chatroom.Do you allow them acces to your school's website? Guess what's under one of these forgotten posts about a singing competition from 2012. Do you let them access some math exercise platform? Does it allow sending people invitations to work together and also let you set…
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The ingenuity of youth always makes me smile. It brings me back to my youth and the things we used to get up to, in retrospect it was a huge learning experience for me. Learning how to think outside the box, finding ways things could be utilized outside of their intended use, etc.
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French kids started doing this in the 1930s with the talking clock (a French invention BTW). The clock was basically a busbar: callers were all connected to the clock. When it was not speaking the time (at the minute) callers could speak and be heard by others. And it was a free call!The phone system had switched to digital by the time I started…
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It goes back even further, to 1960s/70s-era phone phreaking. A lot of budding phreaks started out by finding miswired PBX systems and using their number-out-of-service announcement recordings as impromptu conference bridges.Some of this is documented in audio, on https://evan-doorbell.com/ for anyone interested.
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I went on Spotify to check out these playlists. I very quickly found that they have “corn” playlists that abuse the fact that you can upload videos for podcasts. A few are a screen recording of a windows Home Screen with a tiny video player in the corner playing adult videos. I had a laugh, nature always erm finds a way
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Back in ~2001 I ran a fairly popular blog commenting system - back then most blogs didn't have built-in comments, so I offered javascript embeds to add them to posts.One day performance started to go down rapidly, and within a few days my host got in touch about unusual CPU usage.I tracked it down to a series of random blogger.com blog posts with…
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I was surprised last week to find that Spotify has turned in to full on social media/youtube now.I left Spotify off of screentime limits for my son so that he could listen to music or books at bedtime, and found him watching "podcasts" which have full youtube style pages with videos and comments.
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"The goal is just to connect with people. You have nothing to talk about. You don't know each other very well. You're just seeing each other and acknowledging each other's presence"This right here is ham radio in a nutshell. These kids need transceivers and should give morse code a try.
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Discovered my kid doing exactly this years ago. We purposefully limited all social media, locked dowb devices etc, but life uh.. finds a way.I was impressed, just had the standard talk about how you have to assume everything you put out on the internet never goes away and that you really have no idea who is on the other side of the screen, never…
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The Onion predicted this in 2014: "Teens Migrating From Facebook To Comments Section Of Slow-Motion Deer Video" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4mMY2Kl3GY)Reminds me a little bit of the agent improvised coordination schemes.
- Yesterday
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https://www. theverge.com/entertainment/100 1056/this-american-life-npr-kids-group-chat-comment-section Uh oh, we've found another swarm of immature autonomous agents going rogue in the comments section. There's a greater than 10% chance they could destroy the world! 🙀
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Jälleen hyvä muistutus, että nuorilta ei voi kieltää nettiä Tämän(kin) takia olisi paljon olennaisempaa keskittyä somen ongelmien korjaamiseen kuin laittaa vaan kieltoa nuorille
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Jälkeen hyvä muistutus, että byirukta ei voi kieltää nettiä Tämän(kin) takia olisi paljon olennaisempaa keskittyä somen ongelmien korjaamiseen kuin laittaa vaan kieltoa nuorille
- Sep 26
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This is actually very funny because when I was at NPR, we stole a trick from middle school kids by using a shared Google Doc as a chatroom when Slack went down. https://www. theverge.com/entertainment/100 1056/this-american-life-npr-kids-group-chat-comment-section One good turn deserves another.