If you’ve ever tried to learn a language or been on social media, you’ve probably heard of Duolingo. 

Duolingo is a language learning app made famous because of its large social media presence. This is mainly because of their social media strategy of being “relatable” and “quirky” with its social media posts, as seen in the examples below:

Duolingo’s dominance over social media is mainly caused by them embracing the meme where their green mascot, Duo, will come and kill your friends and family if you lose your streak. They first started this by making the musical “Duo on Ice”, where they incorporated internet memes like “Spanish or Vanish”, “French or the Trench”, “Japanese or Broken Knees”, etc. 

However, recently, Duolingo has made a blunder costing them most of their social media reputation. Duolingo’s CEO stated that “AI is a better language teacher than humans”, causing extreme outrage among its fans. Comments across all their social medias erupted in hateful comments about the CEO’s recent statement, and it seemed like everything the Duolingo marketing team worked for had gone to waste. 

So, Duolingo chose to take a risk. Duolingo pretended to be hacked by deleting all their Instagram and Tik Tok posts, removed their profile picture, and replaced their bio with quotes such as “real eyes realize real lies”, “r/im14andthisisdeep”, etc. The public’s general reaction was bad, drawing more negative attention to their social media accounts and draining their followers.