The hottest new hangout for middle schoolers is NPR’s comment section?

Parents have spent years trying to keep their kids off social media, so some kids headed to the one place no adult would think to look for them: NPR.

On this week’s “ This American Life ,” host Ira Glass tells the story of the team behind NPR’s podcast “Wild Card,” who noticed a flood of baffling comments under their Spotify episodes last fall. A producer assumed the bizarre abbreviations and indecipherable emojis were bot traffic and shared screenshots in NPR’s Slack. They then reported the posts to Spotify.