When Dave Blanchard, who runs the public radio show Wild Card, noticed unusual activity in the Spotify comments for an episode featuring writer Elizabeth Gilbert, his first instinct was bot activity. The comments were cryptic and incoherent—phrases like “Gilgamesh quit and I’m crying” and “Your cats are so cute”—scattered across multiple accounts that seemed to interact with each other.
Blanchard deleted the posts and reported them to Spotify as suspected bot activity. But Hannah Chinn, a younger NPR staffer, recognized something different in the screenshots. The display names—“Ella with five emojis” and special character usernames—and the pattern of short, enthusiastic exchanges with extra exclamation points suggested kids, not bots.
Chinn, who grew up homeschooled with limited social media access and had used unconventional internet spaces to communicate with friends, posted on NPR’s Slack channel suggesting the comments were “middle schoolers” using the Spotify comment thread “as their group chat, maybe because other apps on their phones are blocked.”
Blanchard remained skeptical. “This is Wild Card with Rachel Martin on NPR—not our target demo to have a bunch of middle schoolers in our comment section,” he wrote. But Chinn’s further digging was convincing. The kids appeared to have created a public Spotify playlist named “New Chat” containing a single podcast episode. Other children would discover the playlist, find the episode, and post comments there as a meeting point.
Chinn also noted the kids had posted a Google Form with a quiz, writing “Fill this out. Only cool people can fill this out.”—behavior consistent with Gen Alpha internet practices, not bots.
“When they were like, this is something that I did, that’s what unlocked it,” Blanchard said, recalling that Chinn’s personal experience helped him see the pattern. “I could go back and look at it again, and I had the lens on to see it. And I was like, oh my god, they are kids.”
NPR reached out to some commenters. One agreed to participate: a 14-year-old girl named Ella, who confirmed she was indeed a middle schooler using the platform to connect with peers.
Key facts
- Middle schoolers were using Spotify comments on a Wild Card NPR podcast episode as a group chat
- One child created a public Spotify playlist named ‘New Chat’ containing the episode to direct others to it
- Hannah Chinn, an NPR employee, recognized the behavior as typical internet activity for kids with restricted app access
- Dave Blanchard initially believed the comments were bot activity before being convinced otherwise
- One of the commenters, a 14-year-old girl named Ella, confirmed her identity to NPR