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

An almost year-old Fb occasion for a “easy maths competitors” has been probably the most 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 powerful stat for any single publish, nevertheless it’s the second quarter in a row through which 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 era 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 previous engagement bait tactic. The header picture for the occasion is a picture of a bit 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 seem like a standard picture publish. The picture additionally has some placing similarities to different seemingly basic math 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, almost a yr later, the occasion is seeing common feedback from Fb customers — most of whom are intent on earnestly explaining how the equation needs to 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 way more profitable than every other current posts from Ibeh, who has about 25,000 Fb followers.

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