Not so long ago, the internet often felt like a fully detached realm of ephemeral fun. Today, we wake up to tweets from a president that seem intended to goad a rogue state into nuclear war. Hackers launch ransomware worms that tear across the globe in a matter of hours, paralyzing massive multinational infrastructure companies. And organized hatred online reaches out directly into the physical world, embodied in terrorist violence from the streets of New York City to Istanbul to Egypt to Charlottesville.

More than ever, the internet has shown that its dangers aren't somehow unhooked from real world. The internet is the real world, for better and, in multiplying, unexpected ways, for worse. With that in mind, these are the dangerous characters we’ve been watching online in 2017.

Donald Trump

For the third year in a row, Trump tops our list of world's most dangerous online personas. In just the most recent months of his first year as president, he's used his Twitter to fan hatred, spreading fake anti-Muslim videos from a discredited rightwing British group. He has undermined his own State Department's diplomatic efforts to prevent nuclear war by taunting and threatening North Korea. And he has systematically sought to erode Americans' trust in the media. When Americans can't agree on basic truths like the role of Russia in meddling with the US election, and Libyan or Burmese officials discount reports of slavery and ethnic cleansing in their countries as "fake news," credit Trump's misinformation offensive. Trump remains a solipsistic bully and a temperamental, pathological and systematic liar—one who's able to issue his threats, insults, and lies directly to millions of people from the smartphone in his pocket.

Ajit Pai

If you've heard of Federal Communications Commission chair Ajit Pai, chances are it's because he led the charge to gut the agency's net neutrality protections. For more than a decade, FCC chairs from both parties sought to ban broadband providers from blocking or otherwise discriminating against lawful content online. But thanks to Pai, the likes of Comcast and Verizon will soon be free to pick winners and losers online.

Even if the courts shoot down Pai's plan, he'll still be in charge of the agency responsible for enforcing those protections, something he's shown little interest in doing so far. But that's not the only reason he made our list. Pai is also working to dismantle a federal program that would have subsidized internet access for low-income Americans, may soon allow DSL providers to discontinue service in rural areas without having to provide replacement services, and stood idly by as bots undermined the FCC's public comment system.

In short, his policies could lead to fewer people having internet access, fewer options for those who had afford it, and a decline in digital participation in government.

Ashin Wirathu

Extremist Burmese monk Ashin Wirathu has spouted hate in his sermons for years against Myanmar's Rohingya Muslim minority group. And after the government banned him from making public speeches, he has reached out to his followers via Facebook instead, spreading misinformation and propaganda that paints the Rohingya as foreign terrorists who must be expelled from the country. That hate speech has helped to fuel a wave of massacres, beatings, rape, and arson against thousands of Rohingya in Myanmar's Rakhine state, and pushed hundreds of thousands of Rohingya into squalid makeshift refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh. As a result, the UN has officially accused Myanmar's military of ethnic cleansing. Wirathu, sometimes called the "Buddhist Bin Laden," claimed in June that his posts on Facebook were censored and that he'd been temporarily banned. But he's since reappeared on the site, and continued to post content supporting his extremist views.

ISIS

Since it first came into the global spotlight in 2014, ISIS has been synonymous with nihilistic violence. But more than ever before, its most influential presence is digital. As the group has been stripped of physical territory—including its strongholds in Mosul, Iraq and Raqqa, Syria—it has nonetheless continued to pull in converts through its social media seduction, convincing them to kill themselves and many others. From January's attack in an Istanbul nightclub, to the killing of eight cyclists in New York by a flat-bed truck, to the massacre of more than 300 Egyptians last month, ISIS's handiwork—whether through direct contact with attackers or the creation of propaganda that motivated them—has become no less bloody, even as the actual "state" from which it takes its name has dissipated.

Shadow Brokers

Since the summer of 2016, the mysterious group calling itself the Shadow Brokers has trolled and tortured the National Security Agency, touting a shocking cache of secret NSA hacking tools that it somehow obtained, and has since been leaking piecemeal into the open internet. But it was only in April of this year that the worst happened: One Shadow Brokers release included the powerful NSA programs EternalBlue and EternalRomance, both of which used flaws in a Microsoft protocol known as Server Message Block to allow hackers to compromise virtually any Windows machine that wasn’t updated with a patch that Microsoft rushed out ahead of the leak.