Rejoice! Duo, the owl mascot of Duolingo — the popular language-learning app — is dead. On Feb. 11, the company announced Duo’s death through social media, launching a widespread publicity stunt. Large-following accounts — such as the singer Dua Lipa, the official X account, and the World Health Organization — joined in to share their condolences.
As part of the stunt, the company pretended to investigate his cause of death, concluding that it was a Tesla Cybertruck that killed him. On Feb. 13, the company posted a video killing the rest of their mascots and released a series of cross-eyes plushies of Duo and his friends in coffins the next day.
What started as users getting faux-threatening notifications from Duo to remind them of their daily lessons has gotten out of control. Duo, a once-lovable owl that encouraged people to take daily language lessons, should stay dead, and with him, Duolingo’s strange marketing strategies.
Publicly killing Duo has not affected the app’s operations; users are still getting notifications from the owl reminding them to do their lessons. Therefore, the purpose and resolution of such a large-scale prank are hard to grasp. The involvement of cybertrucks as the cause of death is also baffling and even insensitive, considering the real-life cybertruck-related accidents that so often plague the news.
The company posted some statements alluding that Duo may come back to life if people do their lessons, but people who use the app do not need dead birds on their timelines to encourage them. A notification works just fine.
This bizarre, cash-grabbing stunt is one in a long line of efforts by the company’s media team to turn Duo into a viral sensation. The purpose of the app — to teach people languages — is entirely secondary to Duo’s function as an online meme. Previous stunts include giving the owl a BBL and having sponge children with the Scrub Daddy mascot. These would have been funny as occasional ventures, but all the company’s social accounts are flooded with nonsensical content pandering to the chronically online.
Duolingo’s mission is to provide a personalized education, make learning fun and be universally accessible. Their online presence serves no aspect of that mission and harms the company’s image by turning it into a joke. Their gimmicks are no longer cute or funny. Their insistence on chasing TikTok trends to accumulate likes has degraded their content into brain rot. It almost seems like the language-learning side of the company is completely separated from its social media team, who can think of nothing more entertaining than making their giant green plush owl twerk and Dua Lipa jokes.
Duolingo must redeem itself to the users who trust the app to provide a productive learning platform and leave aside its hunger for follower interactions.
English
Spanish