A almost year-old Facebook event for a “easy maths competitors” has been one of essentially the most viral posts on the platform for six months. The “event” racked up about 51 million views on Facebook throughout the first quarter of 2025, in line with the corporate’s latest report on “broadly considered content material” on the platform.

That might be a formidable stat for any single put up, but it surely’s the second quarter in a row during which the “maths competitors” has nabbed the quantity two spot on Meta’s listing of broadly considered content material. It additionally appeared on final quarter’s report, throughout which era it obtained about 64.3 million views, in line with an archived model of the report.

So why is a random Facebook event that is probably not an event getting greater than 100 million views? It might appear to be a repackaging of an outdated engagement bait tactic. The header picture for the event is a picture of a piece of paper with the phrases “solely for genius” adopted by a seemingly easy equation. When shared as a Facebook put up, the picture is prominently displayed in a means which will appear like a regular picture put up. The picture additionally has some putting similarities to different seemingly easy math equations which have been going viral on Facebook for nearly 15 years.

A take a look at the event web page itself exhibits that tons of of hundreds of folks have engaged with the event. Greater than 800,000 folks responded to the supposed July 8, 2024 event. Even now, almost a yr later, the event is seeing common feedback from Facebook 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 primary arithmetic with strangers on the web.

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

In any case, the put up presents an attention-grabbing window into the sorts of weird content material and questionable ways that also often goes mega-viral on Facebook. Meta lately mentioned it will crack down on creators sharing spammy posts on Facebook, although it is unclear if this kind of engagement bait would fall underneath the class of content material it is explicitly making an attempt to discourage.