A fake Facebook event disguised as a math problem has been one of its top posts for 6 months

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 in the course of 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 publish, but it surely’s the second quarter in a row wherein the “maths competitors” has nabbed the quantity two spot on Meta’s checklist 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 not likely an occasion getting greater than 100 million views? It might 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 that will appear to be 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 exhibits that a whole bunch 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 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 every other current posts from Ibeh, who has about 25,000 Fb followers.

In any case, the publish presents an attention-grabbing window into the sorts of weird content material and questionable ways that also commonly goes mega-viral on Fb. Meta just lately stated it will 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.