The fake Facebook incident disguised as a mathematical problem has been one of its top posts in 6 months

For six months, a “Simple Math Contest” event for nearly a year has been one of the most viral posts on the platform. According to the company’s latest report on “Wide Viewed Content” on the platform, the “activity” had about 51 million views on Facebook in the first quarter of 2025.

This is an impressive stat for any article, but it is the second quarter of the second consecutive quarter of the “Mathematics Competition” that ranked Meta’s extensive viewing content list second. It also appeared in the last quarter report, receiving approximately 64.3 million views during that period, according to the archived version of the report.

So why is a random Facebook event not really an event that gets over 100 million views? This seems to be a repackaging of the old engagement bait tactic. The title image of the event is an image of a piece of paper with “For Genius only” on it, followed by the seemingly simple equation. When shared as a Facebook post, the image is displayed significantly in a way that looks like a normal image post. The image also has some amazing similarities to other seemingly simple mathematical equations that have been popular on Facebook for nearly 15 years.

Viewing the event page itself shows that thousands of people were involved in the event. More than 800,000 people responded to the July 8, 2024 event. Even now, almost a year later, the event is still seeing regular comments from Facebook users – most people intend to seriously explain how equations should be solved (or explanations with others). As slate Back in 2013, it was irresistible to argue with strangers on the internet about basic arithmetic.

A little puzzle is why this post became popular a few months after its initial release. I touched the account behind the post, which was a Nigerian creator named Ebuka Peter Ibeh and did not hear it immediately. The post seems to be successful than any other post recently by IBEH, which has about 25,000 Facebook followers.

Anyway, the post provides an interesting window into some bizarre content and questionable strategies that are still often used on Facebook. Meta recently said it would hit creators who share spam posts on Facebook, although it is unclear whether this engagement bait would fall into the category of content it explicitly tries to discourage.