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 viral posts on the platform for six months. The “occasion” racked up about 51 million views on Fb throughout the first quarter of 2025, in response to the corporate’s latest report on “extensively seen content material” on the platform.

That will be a powerful stat for any single submit, but it surely’s the second quarter in a row by which the “maths competitors” has nabbed the quantity two spot on Meta’s listing of extensively seen content material. It additionally appeared on final quarter’s report, throughout which period it obtained about 64.3 million views, in response to 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 It might appear to be a repackaging of an outdated engagement bait tactic.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 submit, the picture is prominently displayed in a approach which will appear like a standard picture submit. The picture additionally has some hanging similarities to different seemingly basic math equations which have been going viral on Fb for nearly 15 years.

A have a look at the occasion web page itself reveals that a whole lot of hundreds of individuals have engaged with the occasion. Greater than 800,000 folks responded to the supposed July 8, 2024 occasion. Even now, almost 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 fundamental arithmetic with strangers on the web.

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

In any case, the submit gives an fascinating window into the sorts of weird content material and questionable techniques that also recurrently goes mega-viral on Fb. Meta just lately stated it might crack down on creators sharing spammy posts on Fb, although it is unclear if such a engagement bait would fall below the class of content material it is explicitly attempting to discourage.