A pretend Fb occasion disguised as a math drawback...

A virtually year-old Fb occasion for a “easy maths competitors” has been one of the crucial viral posts on the platform for six months. The “occasion” racked up about 51 million views on Fb in the course of the first quarter of 2025, based on the corporate’s latest report on “extensively seen content material” on the platform.

That might be a formidable stat for any single publish, nevertheless it’s the second quarter in a row by which the “maths competitors” has nabbed the quantity two spot on Meta’s record of extensively seen content material. It additionally appeared on final quarter’s report, throughout which period it acquired about 64.3 million views, based on an archived model of the report.

So why is a random Fb occasion that is not likely an occasion getting greater than 100 million views? It could appear to be a repackaging of an outdated engagement bait tactic. The header picture for the occasion is a picture of a chunk of paper with the phrases “just for genius” adopted by a seemingly easy equation. When shared as a Fb publish, the picture is prominently displayed in a manner which will appear to be a traditional picture publish. The picture additionally has some hanging similarities to different seemingly simple arithmetic equations which were going viral on Fb for nearly 15 years.

A take a look at the occasion web page itself exhibits that a whole lot of 1000’s of individuals have engaged with the occasion. Greater than 800,000 folks responded to the supposed July 8, 2024 occasion. Even now, practically a 12 months later, the occasion is seeing common feedback from Fb customers — most of whom are intent on earnestly explaining how the equation ought to be solved (or arguing with others’ interpretation). As Slate famous again in 2013, there’s one thing irresistible about arguing fundamental arithmetic with strangers on the web.

What’s a little bit of a thriller is why this publish has gone so viral months after it was initially posted. I reached out to the account behind the publish, a Nigerian-based creator named Ebuka Peter Ibeh and did not instantly hear again. The publish appears to be much more profitable than another current posts from Ibeh, who has about 25,000 Fb followers.

In any case, the publish affords an fascinating window into the sorts of weird content material and questionable ways that also usually goes mega-viral on Fb. Meta lately stated it will crack down on creators sharing spammy posts on Fb, although it is unclear if one of these engagement bait would fall below the class of content material it is explicitly attempting to discourage.