“So health insurance. Very benefits. Wow. Many coverage. Much affordable. Such HealthCare.gov.”
Depending on your level of Internet fluency, this sentence conjures up images of either someone who has forgotten about verbs or a skeptical Shiba Inu.
This is the latter. The above text accompanied Doge, a popular meme. Essentially, Doge shows a picture of a Shiba Inu dog – sometimes with raised eyebrows, sometimes with a scarf, sometimes prancing in snow – covered in dog-level thoughts about the topic at hand. It’s an old meme in viral terms—Know Your Meme pegs its date of origin in summer of 2013.
That didn’t stop the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) from hopping on board. In late February, @HHSGov posted a Doge meme with the above text, and a link to healthcare.gov.
The Internet was less than pleased. Here are some responses from Twitter:
“Ugh.” -@JeffYoung
“noooo.” -@BuzzFeed
“well that’s it then. Doge is no longer cool.” -@Ajay_H_Kumar
Response aside, the tweet quickly garnered over 1,000 retweets and 696 favorites.
