Over 115 million people have seen this puzzle! So what's the solution?

Some questions and riddles asked on social media platforms like Facebook can get a lot of interaction from users. The biggest reason for posts like “Only geniuses can find this answer” or “Only people with high IQs can understand” is that they also bring high interaction. A post like this, despite having a fake contest, has become one of the most viewed and most popular posts on Facebook in the last six months.

“ONLY FOR GENIUSES”

Facebook’s transparency center has released a content report showing what people are seeing on Facebook. The report includes some interesting information, including the most viewed posts in the first quarter of 2025. In second place is a post by a user named Ebuka Peter Ibeh. You probably don’t know this name, but you’ve probably seen his post before.

When we look at Ibeh’s post, we see that the cover image is a piece of paper that says “For Geniuses Only” and then it is about the activity that includes a math question .

These types of posts have been around since the beginning of social media platforms, but they still continue to attract as much attention as they did on the first day. People interact with these posts to show that they know the answer and to discuss why others are wrong. Here is the post shared by Ibeh, which is still an indication of how viral these can become.

VIEWED BY MORE THAN 51 MILLION PEOPLE

It’s interesting that Ibeh’s post received more attention than others, becoming one of the most viewed posts on the platform. It was Facebook’s second most viewed post in Q1 2025, with over 51 million views in that quarter alone. It also became one of the most popular posts in Q4 2024, with 64.3 million views. That’s over 115 million views in just six months.

Despite the fact that the “simple math challenge” wasn’t actually an actual event, more than 803,000 people engaged with the page to answer the question. It’s unclear exactly what caused the post’s popularity to explode over the past six months.

In April, Facebook announced that spam content overshadows real content creators and negatively impacts the Facebook experience. Therefore, accounts that manipulate distribution and engagement or fill the feed with spam content will receive fewer views and fewer opportunities to earn money. It is not hard to guess that this type of post falls into this category. Also, the platform’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, admitted that Facebook is far from its former popularity. However, this type of viral content shows how many users still use the platform.

SO WHAT IS THE ANSWER TO THIS MATHEMATICAL QUESTION?

Although the answer to the question is found to be 5 by many users, it is actually 11. In the operation “3×3−3÷3+3”, multiplication, division, subtraction and finally addition must be done first. In other words, the solution to the problem is;

3 × 3 = 9