The rise and fall of Duolingo’s public persona
Serena Kanji-Ramji, Staff Writer
After capturing the internet’s attention with a green bird costume and unique marketing, the language-learning app Duolingo became a popular online phenomenon—until May 2025, when the company announced it was transitioning to an AI-first model.
With the backlash coming in swiftly and decidedly, Duolingo is arguably facing its biggest PR crisis to date.
Rise of the green owl
In 2021, Duolingo became much more than just another education app—it transformed into a content powerhouse. Spearheaded by the company’s former social media manager, Zaria Parvez, it unleashed unprecedented marketing strategies that permanently altered how brands interact with their audiences.
It started with a green owl suit. Duolingo’s owl has become an ambassador for its brand. To achieve this, Parvez took a unique approach: she personified the mascot, naming it ‘Duo’ and giving it a distinct personality.
“He’s pure and nice, but with a diva personality,” is how chief marketing officer Manu Orssaud described Duo. Orssaund goes on to say that “we’ve used [these traits] as a source of inspiration to build narratives and turn him into an influencer.”
Create an influencer, the company did. ‘Duo,’ the mascot’s personality, became bigger than life through several marketing stunts. Among the most memorable are the thirst tweets addressed to English singer-songwriter Dua Lipa, reading, “do you love me back @DUALIPA.” A simple tweet that went viral because of its memeability.
Another staple of the Duolingo team’s marketing was Duo “jokingly” threatening users to do their daily lessons. Often, this took the form of responding to comments left by followers, such as “it would be a shame if you lost your streak.”
The company leaned into the joke of the owl issuing thinly veiled threats, even going as far as to have the avatar of Duo threatening to kidnap users’ families.
While the concept of a big green bird threatening to break into your house and kidnap your family may have been dismissed as lame humour from a company trying to be relatable in other circumstances, for Duolingo, it only led to further notoriety.
In an interview with Digiday, Parvez spoke about how she achieved that.
“The way I think about it, especially when I’m commenting as Duo or creating content as Duo, is Duo is that pushy friend that motivates you,” she said. “But we never want Duo to be that pushy friend that makes you hate your existence. He wants you to do well and will always be up in your business. The way to make Duo love you is to do your lesson.”
Parvez often generated the most engagement by inserting Duo into trending pop culture moments. In one instance, Duo appeared on the pink carpet at the Barbie movie premiere, a marketing strategy that generated over 150 million impressions across social media platforms.
In 2021, the very year Duolingo leaned into “unhinged” marketing, the monthly user base grew from 40 million to 116 million. By all accounts, Duolingo’s marketing antics were cementing its status as a pop culture icon.
Fall of a pop culture icon
Last spring, the CEO of Duolingo, Luis von Ahn, announced in a LinkedIn press release that they were transitioning to be an AI-first company. While it was shifting how the company was run, it was still, at its core, an organisation that cares about its employees, and the switch was simply to boost productivity.
“This isn’t about replacing Duos with AI,” read the post. “It’s about removing bottlenecks so we can do more with the outstanding Duos we already have.”
As a result of the company’s shift towards AI, it laid off around 10 per cent of its contract workers, according to a CNN report.
The backlash was instantaneous—starting in the comments section of the press release.
“Your hypocrisy knows no bounds. I hope more and more people will uninstall your app, which has clearly betrayed its own mission,” wrote one LinkedIn user. Another wrote, “My 2276-day streak ends here.”
The criticism wasn’t limited to the press release, as it started gaining traction on other platforms as well. In one day, Duolingo lost 300,000 followers across platforms.
TikTok creator Kimberly Online made a video explaining why so many people are upset, saying that when companies move towards AI and openly talk about it, it creates such a strong response from people because “most people aren’t so stupid enough to mindlessly clap for something that could well enough replace them themselves one day.”
But AI replacing people in Duolingo headquarters isn’t the only reason Duo fans were so upset. Fans of both the app and the Duolingo owl persona reacted as if they were personally involved in the situation.
Marketing professor at Mount Royal University, Kylie McMullen, says that when a brand becomes personal with its customer base, in this case by giving the mascot a personality, it can create a parasocial relationship.
People become very attached to the brand and begin to view it almost as a permanent fixture in their lives rather than as an entity they are giving money to.
“You’re giving your brand a personality, you’re almost anthropomorphizing a company into a singular entity, or an individual, that people can feel friendly towards, or friends with,” says McMullen. “Then, when the company does something that a person might disagree with, it feels like a personal affront as opposed to a business decision.”
When examining why AI in particular felt like such an affront, she explains, “we imbued this owl with a personality. So to discover that a company is also investing heavily into AI and taken away from that human element and that human touch, from what they do in other angles, it feels disingenuous.”
Is Duolingo really dead?
While Duolingo has lost much of its social capital and isn’t the pop culture staple it used to be, saying the app has lost most of its users is incorrect. In November 2025, six months after the company’s press release, they are reported to still have 50 million daily users.
They also still have a strong social media presence, with 17 million TikTok followers and over four million Instagram followers.
So, in the end, did Duolingo really fall off the face of the earth? The numbers show that they did not. But it remains to be seen whether the company can win back the public’s good graces. Maybe one day you’ll see a green owl on a red carpet again.
