Intergenerational Space Travel

Ira Glass (0:01)

A quick warning, there are curse words that are un-Beeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a Beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org.

Ira Glass (0:11)

Dave Blanchard runs the public radio show Wildcard. 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. They must have struck a nerve this episode. And then he looked at the comments.

Dave Blanchard (0:37)

And it was just like gibberish. Like I just, there was, there's a bunch of new comments, but I couldn't make heads or tail of, of any of them. They're just kind of these like clipped, weird, incoherent postings that I was just like, it, it screened bots just cause like anytime that I see just kind of gibberish and like a comment on the internet, I assume it's a bot. But the fact that they was all from different accounts seemed very weird. And the fact that they also maybe seem to be like interacting in some way also seemed weird and not like typical bot behavior.

Ira Glass (1:10)

Can I ask you to read some of this comment?

Dave Blanchard (1:12)

So yeah, I've got some from a later batch. We've got some where it's like, you know, someone says, ah, okay, MH. 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 (1:36)

So okay, bots, he thought. Some newfangled kind of bots that respond to each other somehow.

He deleted the posts.

Dave Blanchard (1:43)

And I went back to the Spotify comments again and there was a new comment, and it said, so it deleted my com. And that felt not body. 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 (2:05)

And then there were other responses to that.

Dave Blanchard (2:08)

So, someone says the user name cotton slash amity, parentheses, I'm back, bitches, commented weird. Aubrey commented, that's weirds, two Ss.

Ira Glass (2:21)

This is really not looking like any bot behavior you'd ever seen. So, he goes to NPR Slack channels, posts some screenshots, described what these comments are. And one of the higher ups, Mathilde, suggests reporting it to Spotify, which Dave does.

And then, some of the younger at NPR reads the thread. They're ten years younger than Dave, Gen Z, not millennial, named Hannah Chin.

Hannah Chin (2:45)

And I click into the screenshots, and almost immediately, I'm like, oh, my conclusion is really, really different than Dave's and Mathilde'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, right? Like posting on forums and stuff. And so I look at their display names. Their display names are like Ella with like five emojis, and they're like the special character emojis. They're like the ones that you have to like go onto the internet and type your name into like a special text generator, and then it comes out as a special character, and then you have to like special paste it into your profile.

Ira Glass (3:29)

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 highs, lots of extra exclamation points.

Hannah recognized it. They grew up in a conservative home, was homeschooled, with limited access to social media.

Hannah Chin (3:49)

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 (4:13)

So Hannah writes out a comment to post on Slack, shows it to their housemate for 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 Chin (4:25)

And I say, okay, 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 kind of 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. Well, like these are middle schoolers.