Donald Trump, Kanye West and Rihanna among Time Magazine’s ‘most influential people on the Internet’ list for 2018

Dave Hanratty

Fair play to you if you recognise most of this list…

It’s that most exciting time of year again when the cream of the crop, the killer elite, the most influential people on the Internet are revealed.

Bigger than the World Cup, hotter than Love Island, it really is the big one.

Time Magazine have compiled their fourth annual round-up of what they insist are the 25 Most Influential People on the Internet, and you’ll definitely recognise about four or five of them, anyway.

Those chosen for the unranked list were selected due to “their global impact on social media and their overall ability to drive news.”

The collection includes musicians, an outspoken politician, social activists, controversial YouTubers and high-profile fashion and food icons.

With that criteria in mind, let’s look at the most notable names that are influencing the global populace…

Donald Trump

Given the 45th President of the United States of America’s obsession with Twitter and complete dominance of the news, this one seems a given, really.

Time points to a man who “rode to the office of the presidency on a 140-character soapbox (now 280) and has since turned it into the ultimate presidential bully pulpit.”

Their not-quite-glowing profile notes that “Sometimes, these tweets undermine his own administration” and highlight Trump’s “unorthodox stream of consciousness” approach.

Kanye West

Love him or hate him, Yeezy is box office.

Whether his frenzied return to Twitter was part of some calculated marketing scheme or not, it paid off.

West recently secured his eighth consecutive number one album with the divisive Ye, while the vast majority of his tweets wind up as ‘news’ stories these days.

As Time note; “No matter what, his online persona—with 28 million followers—keeps him squarely in the public eye.”

Rihanna

Rihanna continues to dominate pop culture, too, regardless of whether she has new music out or on the horizon.

Arguably her biggest Internet-related impact this year came in March where she used Instagram to denounce Snapchat after that platform used her image to make light of domestic violence. The result? An $800 million loss in value for Snapchat.

Kylie Jenner

Also troubling Snapchat’s market value was Kylie Jenner, who tweeted about her lack of interest in the service, leading to a loss of over $1.3 billion in value, which had a positive knock-on effect for Facebook.

Influencers, eh?

Elsewhere on the list, it’s a real ‘who’s who’ of people you’ve probably never heard of.

You’ll be familiar with Logan Paul following the popular YouTuber’s horrific decision to shoot a video of a dead body in Japan’s infamous ‘suicide forest’ and his subsequent profuse apology for doing so.

No matter, it seems, as he and his brother Jake make this much-coveted list.

You’ll also find Korean pop outfit BTS, who topped the Billboard 200 chart with their album Love Yourself: Tear; the highest-charting K-pop album in recorded history.

There’s also Ninja, a guy who plays Fortnite a lot and racks up a crazy amount of streaming views doing so, and the students of Parkland, Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who survived a deadly mass shooting earlier this year and have since used their voices and energies to fight for gun control in America.

Time’s full list of influential Internet titans is as follows: