BY: Argyll Cyrus B. Geducos
The Presidential Communications Operations Office yesterday became the talk of the town anew.
The PCOO published the word ‘fafda’ in its Twitter account, without any context, and trended just minutes after publication.
PCOO’s Twitter handle @PresidentialCom, which has 137,000 followers, tweeted the word ‘fafda’ at 1:07 p.m.
The tweet was immediately deleted but it garnered 21 retweets, 29 likes, and hundreds of mocking posts with screenshots in just seven minutes from netizens.
In India, fafda is a popular Gujarati snack made from gram flour, turmeric, and carom seeds.
According to Communications Secretary Martin Andanar, the tweet was made by one of PCOO’s staff.
“It was an accidental tweet made by Angel Abella, one of our Twitter admins. It doesn’t mean anything so she deleted it right away,” Andanar said in a text message. He said Angel is not related to presidential spokesperson Ernesto Abella.
“I immediately wrote a memo to all of our social media admins to be more careful,” he added.
“To prevent any future similar incidents, all members of the OSEC-MEDIA Team are hereby DIRECTED to be more circumspect and diligent in handling the official social media accounts of the PCOO,” Andanar said in the memo.
“Let this Memorandum serve as a warning to everyone concerned. Any future similar incident shall be dealt seriously.”
Baffled netizens gave meaning to the presidential typo.
One of the most popular and most retweeted meaning of fafda was “Frightening Amount of Filipinos Dead Already” by Twitter user Mikhail Quijano (@mikhailquijano). Quijano’s tweet got 169 retweets and 339 likes as of 3 p.m.
Netizens also compared fafda to US President Donald Trump’s controversial typo “covfefe” a few months ago.
“Despite the constant negative press covfefe,” Trump tweeted. Former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer explained that Trump’s covfefe is a coded secret message.