During my foray over at the wonderful world of imageboards, I had a set of chance encounters with someone who put these exact smilies in the name field and posted fringe beliefs and thoughts.
The imageboard he used to post at, which was 4chon, was kill because its admin shuttered it. So, part of the userbase, including the smiley I mentioned, migrated to 8chan.
Eventually, after a certain period of time, a theory that smiley was actually the work of a group of people was validated by a thread over at a certain fringe board. The thread had multiple personas claiming to post as smiley, and were planning some things on a publicly-available thread, much to the consternation of some alleged smiley posters.
Of course, after a while, "they" were involved in more esoteric stuff. Part of that was guessing the meaning behind a(n admittedly) cryptic poem, part of that was the alleged attempted suicide of (one of the) smiley poster(s).
Why I revealed this to you, I don't know