The Facebook event for almost a year for “simple math competition” has been the most viral post on the platform for six months. According to the company’s latest report on the platform, the “event” received about 51 million views on Facebook during the first quarter of 2025.
This will be an impressive state for any one post, but this is the second consecutive quarter in which the “mathematical competition” has occupied the number two in the list of widely viewed content of Meta. According to a reserved version of this report, it was also published on the last quarter report, during which it received about 64 64.3 million views.
So why is there a random Facebook event that is not really in the event of more than 100 million opinions? It seems that this is a restoration of an old engagement bait. The header image for the event is a picture of a piece of paper that contains the words “just Genius” after which seemingly simple equality. When shared as a Facebook post, the image is significantly shown in a manner that can look like a normal image post. The photo also has some similarly similarities to other seemingly easy mathematical equations, which have been going viral on Facebook for about 15 years.
Taking a look at the event page shows that hundreds of thousands are busy in the program. On July 8, 2024, more than 800,000 people responded. Even now, about a year later, the program is seen regular comments from Facebook users – most of which intend to explain how equality should be resolved (or to discuss with others). As if Slate Noted in 2013, there is something irreparable about discussing basic mathematics with strangers on the Internet.
The slightest thing is that the post has actually gone viral after the post was posted. I reached the account behind the post, a creator based in Nigeria whose name was Abuka Peter Eba and did not immediately hear. It seems that the post is far more successful than any recent posts in Abyah, which have about 25,000 Facebook followers.
In any case, the post offers an interesting window of strange content and objectionable tactics that still regularly goes on Facebook. Meta recently said that she would break the creators shared with spime posts on Facebook, though it is unclear that if such a engagement bait falls into the category of this content, it is clearly discouraged.
