A pretend Fb occasion disguised as a math drawback has been certainly one of its prime posts for six months

An almost 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 through the first quarter of 2025, based on the corporate’s latest report on “broadly seen content material” on the platform.

That will be a formidable stat for any single publish, however it’s the second quarter in a row wherein the “maths competitors” has nabbed the quantity two spot on Meta’s listing of broadly 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 probably not an occasion getting greater than 100 million views? It will appear to be a repackaging of an outdated engagement bait tactic.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 means which will appear like a standard picture publish. The picture additionally has some placing 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 reveals that a whole bunch of 1000’s of individuals have engaged with the occasion. Greater than 800,000 individuals 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 must be solved (or arguing with others’ interpretation). As Slate famous again in 2013, there’s one thing irresistible about arguing primary 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 some other latest 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 techniques that also usually goes mega-viral on Fb. Meta not too long ago mentioned it might crack down on creators sharing spammy posts on Fb, although it is unclear if any such engagement bait would fall underneath the class of content material it is explicitly making an attempt to discourage.