Transcript
Ira Glass: Dave Blanchard runs the public radio show Wild Card. And one of the less exciting and, in fact, rather tedious parts of his job is that he has to keep an eye on the comments that people post about the show online. And one day last fall on Spotify, he saw all this activity about this episode they did with the writer Elizabeth Gilbert. And Dave thought, oh, her book was controversial. It must have struck a nerve, this episode. And then he looked at the comments.
Dave Blanchard: And it was just, like, gibberish. There was a bunch of new comments, but I couldn't make heads or tail of any of them. They're just these clipped, weird, incoherent postings that I was just like-- it screamed bots, just because anytime that I see just gibberish in a comment on the internet, I assume it's a bot. But the fact that they were all from different accounts seemed very weird. And the fact that they also maybe seemed to be interacting in some way also seemed weird and not like typical bot behavior.
Ira Glass: Can I ask you to read some of those comments?
Dave Blanchard: So yeah, I've got some from a later batch. We've got some where it's like, someone says, "Ah, OK, M-H." And two people have hearted that. Someone says, "Gilgamesh quit and I'm crying." "Last Friday I broke up with my GF." "Your cats are so cute." "You're gorgeous in that dress. OML, pink heart."
Ira Glass: So OK, bots, he thought, some newfangled kind of bots that respond to each other somehow. He deleted the posts.
Dave Blanchard: And I went back to the Spotify comments again. And there was a new comment that said, uh, so it deleted my com. And that felt not botty. That felt very strange that a bot would be able to recognize that the thread got deleted and post it, letting people know that it had been deleted.
Ira Glass: And then there were other responses to that.
Dave Blanchard: So someone says, username cotton/amity, parentheses, I'm back, bitches, commented, "Weird." Aubrey commented, "That's weirdss," two S's.
Ira Glass: This is really not looking like any bot behavior he'd ever seen. So he goes to NPR's Slack channels, post some screenshots, describes what these comments are. And one of the higher-ups, Matilde, suggests reporting it to Spotify, which Dave does. And then somebody younger at NPR reads the thread. They're 10 years younger than Dave-- Gen Z, not millennial, named Hannah Chinn.
Hannah Chinn: And I click into the screenshots, and almost immediately I'm like, oh. My conclusion is really, really different than Dave's and Matilde's, because I'm like, these are kids. And I think that part of that is because I was a middle schooler on the internet, posting on forums and stuff.
And so I look at their display names. Their display names are, like, Ella with five emojis. And they're the special character emojis. They're the ones that you have to go onto the internet and type your name into a special text generator, and then it comes out as a special character, and then you have to special paste it into your profile.
Ira Glass: Their profile pictures are all cartoon characters Hannah's never seen before. And then there's the way that they're commenting back and forth with each other, short little phrases. I'm sorry. That's weird. Lots of hi's, lots of extra exclamation points. Hannah recognized it. They grew up in a conservative home, was homeschooled, with limited access to social media.
Hannah Chinn: And so I was a kid who used weird parts of the internet not as they were originally designed to talk to my friends. I talked back and forth with my friends on Google Docs. And we would type things and then delete them, and then type things and then make them invisible by making the text white on the white background. So I think this is familiar behavior to me.
Ira Glass: So Hannah writes out a comment to post on Slack, shows it to their housemate before posting because they're worried about coming off maybe too harsh with these much higher-ranking, older NPR bosses who Hannah had never met in person.
Hannah Chinn: And I say, OK, maybe I'm wrong, but I think these are just kids hanging out and we shouldn't report them as bots. My guess is that they're just using Spotify comment threads as their group chat, maybe because other apps on their phones are blocked. Who knows? And they happen to have chosen a wild card episode to do it, LOL. These are middle schoolers.
Ira Glass: Middle schoolers specifically, not high schoolers?
Hannah Chinn: Yeah, these are people who are new to chatting with each other on the internet and in real life. They're kids who are excited to talk to other people on the internet. 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 in the chat.
Ira Glass: Dave reads Hannah's Slack message. And, well, he is not convinced. He posts--
Dave Blanchard: That's an interesting theory.
Ira Glass: Yeah, that's an interesting theory. There's an exclamation point at the end of it, at least to give it that much credit.
Dave Blanchard: Yes. Admittedly, I was still like, really? Again, this is Wild Card with Rachel Martin on NPR-- not our target demo to have a bunch of middle schoolers in our comment section. It just felt so completely implausible that these people would have found this particular episode as their place to chat.
Hannah Chinn: Dave is like, oh, that's an interesting theory. And I, at this point-- sorry, Dave. I don't know you in real life. I'm a little bit annoyed. Because I'm like, I know that I said "maybe I'm wrong," but I was so sure that I was right.
Ira Glass: Hannah does more digging, which makes them even more convinced than before. What the kids seemed to be doing was one kid would create a playlist on Spotify with a name like "Let's chat here." And inside that playlist would be one podcast episode.
And you know how you can see other people's playlists on Spotify if they make them public? Other kids would see that playlist. They'd see the episode. And then they would go to the podcast episode and start posting in the comments.
Hannah got back on Slack and pointed out that the kids were using a playlist that was named New Chat. The kids had also posted a Google Form with some kind of quiz on it and said, "Fill this out. Only cool people can fill this out."
Hannah Chinn: Bots don't really spam Google Forms in my experience, whereas Gen Alpha might use them in the same way that my generation would use uQuiz or the BuzzFeed Make Your Own Personality Quiz feature.
Ira Glass: And reading that was the turning point for Dave.
Dave Blanchard: When they were like, this is something that I did, that's what unlocked it. I think it was so implausible to me. And then when Hannah was like, no, I did this, I was like, oh, wow. I guess it makes sense.
And then it was like, I could go back and look at it again. And it was like, I had the lens on to see it. And I was like, oh, my god, they are kids. In retrospect, it looks so obvious.
Ira Glass: So how exactly did those commenters end up in the comment section of an NPR podcast? What exactly happened here? Well, we reached out to a bunch of the commenters. Only one of them agreed to talk to us.
As suspected, she is not a bot. She's a 14-year-old girl who talked to me from the car with her parents' permission and her dad at the wheel. Her name is Ella. When I asked her to describe herself, she said this.
Ella: I would say that I'm definitely a bit hard to get to know because I don't know a lot about myself yet. But I think if you do get to know me, you'll find out I'm a pretty cool person.
Ira Glass: Ella says this all started with a video podcast that played TikTok videos. Ella thinks a kid started it. The video seemed to be chosen specifically for kids who weren't allowed on TikTok, but were allowed on Spotify. That was Ella. She was allowed on Spotify, but on no social media. And she and the other kids would watch this girl's podcast on Spotify and then chat in the comments of the podcast.
Ella: And her podcast ended up getting banned. And we wanted to keep talking to each other, so people would make playlists.
Ira Glass: She described exactly the system that Hannah figured out. Kids would name their playlist "chat here" or something like that, and then there'd be some podcast, and everybody would go to that podcast and talk in the comments. She says it was maybe 20 kids in the core group-- lots of theater kids, she says, mostly girls, most of them with strict parents who didn't let them on regular social media.
Ira Glass: And can I ask, why did you guys pick NPR shows to be the ones where you went to in the comments?
Ella: I think we just looked for podcasts that didn't have many comments.
Ira Glass: I see. So you picked NPR because it didn't seem very popular.
Ella: Yeah, so that we wouldn't get caught up in other people's comments.
Ira Glass: I tell you, buddy, I do a public radio show, and that hurts a little to hear it.
Ella: [CHUCKLES] Sorry.
Ira Glass: That's OK. Are your parents NPR listeners?
Ella: Yeah, my mom is. She listens to podcasts all the time.
Ira Glass: Was any of this that your parents were NPR listeners, and this felt like this is the perfect cover? Like, if they catch you doing this, you can be like, look, I'm just doing this for an NPR show.
Ella: Yeah.
Ira Glass: Is that true? Did you think about that?
Ella: Yeah, a little bit.
Ira Glass: It's funny. There was this guy named Dave who works for NPR, and he's in his 30s. And he saw the comments that you guys were doing. And they made no sense to him at all. He really had no idea what they were. And he thought you guys were all bots.
Ella: Yeah. Some of them were really young, like 11 years old and stuff. So some of them definitely were a little bit not good at talking English that well. Or using slang.
Ira Glass: I got to say, I thought that was a very generous answer. Dave thought they were bots. And she was like, yeah, well, some of us kind of talked like bots. Ella told me she's sure someday she'll be clueless like Dave is now, which, of course, isn't much comfort if you're Dave. Dave says that once he understood that it was kids writing all those comments, it didn't feel great.
Dave Blanchard: One, I felt bad for having reported them. I definitely felt guilty. And two, old. I just felt very old, very dumb, very out of touch. I literally needed Hannah to be my generational translator. It was such a clarifying realization of my age and obsolescence.
