GoKawiilMiddle 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.