I wrote a (very long) blog post about those viral math problems and am looking for feedback, especially from people who are not convinced that the problem is ambiguous.
It’s about a 30min read so thank you in advance if you really take the time to read it, but I think it’s worth it if you joined such discussions in the past, but I’m probably biased because I wrote it :)
Regarding your first part in general true, but in this case the sheer amount of calculators for both conventions show that this is indeed intended behavior.
Regarding your second point I tried to address that in the “distributive property” section, maybe I need to rewrite it a bit to be more clear.
When I discovered this comment I went to read it, and yes, it’s true you discussed the Distributive Property, however, what these people are talking about is The Distributive Law which isn’t the same thing (though people often call it the wrong name), and makes the question completely unambiguous. You literally can’t move on from the “B”, Brackets, in the rules until there are no brackets left - the B is literally short for “solve Brackets” (every letter is “solve (something)”), and so anyone who does the division before solving the brackets has just violated the order of operations rules.