Inside the weird Internet mystery of the 'Facebook Monopoly Man'

Web sleuths suspected, initially, that there were secrets hidden under the Monopoly Man's jaunty blue Facebook hat. Why else would someone bother uploading the weird illustration 3 million times like that?

If you've spent any time on Imgur - the Internet's largest photo host and the visual depository for Reddit - you've probably seen Facebook Monopoly Man before. He's a cartoon Uncle Pennybags with a Facebook top hat on his bald head, and a passport, credit card and wad of cash at his fat-fingered disposal.

The illustration is pretty obscure, and not particularly stand out: The Canadian artist Erica Glasier drew it to accompany a friend's Forbes post in 2011. Since then, it's been occasionally recycled as stock art; Glasier told The Washington Post it's licensed for sharing under the Creative Commons system, so it was free to spread around.

And yet, even given that, Monopoly Man pops up on Imgur with peculiar, unstatistical frequency. One recent analysis, completed by programmer and longtime Redditor Jim Clark last week, estimates that one of every 120 photos on the site is a copy of Monopoly Man - making it Imgur's single most popular image to date.

Speculation as to why ran rampant, in the sorts of forums where people care about these things: Perhaps Monopoly Man was an error in Imgur's code, or evidence of some internal site testing. Maybe it was the work of some malicious auto-upload bot or some lazy webmaster trying to outsource his own image hosting. Maybe the image was hiding some kind of steganographic code - of the sort used by foreign spies and our future alien overlords!

Or, alternately, maybe it was spam that Imgur didn't even know existed before.

Someone spam-uploaded the image a while ago," Imgur's Michelle Masek told The Post.

Masek went on to explain that it's possible, though not apparent, the spam was uploaded by a bot. But most of the images aren't even available in public galleries or by search: In other words, while they're sitting on Imgur's servers, they're not doing a whole lot.

That said, the banal solution to the Monopoly Man mystery isn't merely disappointing: It's also an instance of a fascinating psychological phenomena called apophenia, which we encounter pretty regularly. Humans, it turns out, have an overwhelming drive to find patterns in random information, even if - especially when - no patterns are forthcoming.

There's no way, the thinking goes, that a gigantic image repository like Imgur, chock-full of billions of spammy, useless, inexplicable images, could possibly contain this particular image so many times. There had to be a pattern, a reason, a conscious agent. Someone had to intend to make Monopoly Man "take over the Internet," as one Gizmodo headline intriguingly put it.

We're quick to conclude, in other words, that such instances necessarily connote meaning. We spend our waking hours amid so many terabytes of formless digital noise that any alternative just seems ... unfeeling.

And yet, there you have it: The Monopoly Man is mere spam. Imgur automatically strips metadata from images on upload, so they don't even know who started him.

That has not dissuaded Clark and other investigators, who are still sifting through the noise. Among the other Imgur photos that pop up too often, statistically, are a photo of a Turkish guy winning a mall Volkswagen and a backlit, shirtless teenage boy, titled "DJ David."

"If you search (Tineye or Google Images) for DJ David, the image doesn't seem like it was ever posted anywhere," Clark said. That, he continues, is "pretty weird."