Npr - GoKawiil

Middle schoolers turn NPR podcast comment sections into de facto group chats

NPR staff discovered that streams of odd emojis and abbreviations under Spotify episodes of its podcast 'Wild Card' were not bot spam but messages from underage kids using the comments as a group chat, according to reporting on 'This American Life.' Producer Hannah Chin identified the pattern after colleagues had already flagged the posts to Spotify as bots, and host Ira Glass later found a similar case had occurred on NPR's TED Radio Hour.

techcrunch.com · 2026-09-25

NPR's Throughline revisits Luddite history amid AI job fears

NPR's podcast Throughline dedicated an episode to the original 19th-century Luddite movement, explaining that these workers were not simply anti-technology but were organizing to protect their livelihoods from mechanization. The episode, prompted by a listener question, features historian Katrina Navickas discussing parallels between that rebellion and today's anxieties over AI displacing jobs.

npr.org · 2026-09-12