Did a variety of celebrities, from Fifty Cent to the White House press secretary, respond with public comments after Bad Bunny joked on Saturday Night Live that Americans had four months to learn Spanish before his Super Bowl halftime appearance? No, that’s not true: This is a fake controversy drummed up by a network of clickbait publishers overseas. A flood of posts on Facebook contain fake quotes attributed to celebrities who had not weighed in on the Puerto Rican rapper’s selection to appear at the 2026 championship game.
A Google search (archived here) for “50 Cent” AND “Bro, this ain’t Duolingo halftime” returned no examples of factual reporting, just duplicates of the traffic-seeking social media posts.
A search on Facebook for “Bad Bunny SNL Duolingo” and “Bad Bunny SNL Clapback” turned up many different posts (pictured below) featuring a variety of famous names and fake quotes. Included are Sharon Osbourne, John Oliver, Pink, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Andy Reid, and Joe Gorga.
One post (archived here) claimed that Karoline Leavitt said the same exact words attributed to 50 Cent:
The page transparency reports for the pages publishing these Facebook posts (examples here and here) show page managers from Indonesia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and the Philippines. This alone does not mean a story is fake, but in recent weeks Lead Stories has debunked many other fake stories originating from Facebook pages managed overseas and linking to low quality fly-by-night websites which could be characterized as “made-for-advertising” or MFA sites.
