The most dangerous people on the Internet in 2025

In 2025, people who built their careers on being a sort of Very Online are now some of the most powerful people in the world.

At the top of the list, like us I predicted it last year– it’s Donald Trump. The 79-year-old President of the United States literally rules by executive orders posted on his social network, Social Truth. The US government, meanwhile, is run by a ramshackle crew of former conspiracy theory podcasters, TV hosts, vaccine skeptics and entertainment moguls. Ten years ago, the prevailing advice was to never read YouTube comments. Today, the human embodiment of YouTube comments determines federal policy.

Beyond members of the Trump administration (be warned, there are quite a few on this year’s list), you’ll find some of the usual suspects: Chinese state-backed hackers, mayhem-sowing members of the Internet underworld, prolific online scammers, and, of course, Elon Musk.

Every year, we round up the people who play a huge role in making the Internet age feel like life itself is a relentless, inescapable comments section – and who are causing real harm from their digital perch. Here is our list for 2025.

Donald Trump

Donald Trump has reached in 2025 what could well be his final form. Freed from the shackles of norms, decorum, and checks and balances, Trump’s second administration is defined by a relentless pursuit of everything that Stephen Miller and Russell Vought believe will make America great again. But Trump remains the poster boy in chief, spewing a never-ending stream of attacks, insults, conspiracy theories and AI bashing on Truth Social.

During a particularly prolific night in early December, the President of the United States job 169 times between approximately 7 p.m. and midnight at the White House. They included calls for Congress to “END THE FILIBUSTER” and missives about the presidential election in Honduras. A few weeks ago, he job that a video reminding U.S. troops of their duty to disobey illegal orders was “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH.” When the president posts, it’s news, which means virtually everyone in the United States has to absorb the chaos Trump is creating online.

This is how every day goes under Trump, as it has for the better part of a decade. Cracks in Trump’s social media armor have begun to appear; Republicans notably pushed back against his insensitive comments after filmmaker Rob Reiner after he and his wife were found stabbed to death in mid-December. Yet Trump dominates nearly every news cycle and wields ever-increasing power to shape and ruin people’s lives in the United States and abroad with a single Truth Social missive. If there’s one principle Trump reliably upholds, it’s this: never. Stop. Assignment.

The border tsars

The Trump administration’s brutal and indiscriminate assaults on people not born in the United States (and even some who were) have defined American life in 2025: masked agents in riot gear prowling the streets, racially profiling pedestrians, and the disappearance of friends and loved ones into the bureaucratic tarpit of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. At the center of this profound overhaul of America are White House adviser Stephen Miller and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

As deputy chief of staff for policy, Miller is widely considered the “architect” Trump’s anti-immigration measures. He was the one who said on television that federal agents arrest 3,000 people per day— a so-called “quota” whose existence the administration has denied, at least when forced to face him in court. Without Miller, your social media – online and offline – may be much less saturated with news and videos of lives being torn apart.

Noem, meanwhile, has become the face of the government’s anti-immigration policies. The head of DHS oversees both ICE and CBP and is therefore directly responsible for how the crackdown on immigrants is carried out. This includes greater social media monitoringA facial recognition application which guides people through government databases and disseminates public responsibility federal agents as illegal “doxing.” Under Noem, CBP even proposed subjecting travelers to the United States to a review of five years of publications on social networks.

DOGE

It sounds like the premise of a sleazy cyberpunk novel: a team made up largely young, inexperienced agents connected to some of the most powerful men in the world bypass normal background checks to access some of the most sensitive systems in the U.S. government. One of their main apparent goals? Wiring data sets to create a main database which could be used for a surveillance tool of unprecedented scope.

This is, of course, what actually happened this year, as reported by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Effectiveness (DOGE). took control on much of the federal bureaucracy.