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897: Intergenerational Space Travel - This American Life

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.

And it was just, like, gibberish. There was

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. Can I ask you to read some of those comments?

So yeah, I've got some from a later

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." So OK, bots, he thought, some newfangled kind of bots that respond to each other somehow. He deleted the posts.

And I went back to the Spotify comments

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. And then there were other responses to that.

So someone says, username cotton/amity, parentheses, I'm back

So someone says, username cotton/amity, parentheses, I'm back, bitches, commented, "Weird." Aubrey commented, "That's weirdss," two S's.

This is really not looking like any bot

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.

And I click into the screenshots, and almost

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

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.

Their profile pictures are all cartoon characters Hannah's

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.

And so I was a kid who used

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.

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897: Intergenerational Space Travel - This American Life

Dave Blanchard runs the public radio show Wild Card.

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