What Is a Public Figure in the Internet Age?
Today’s question is inspired by the story of Scott Alexander, a blogger who found himself at loggerheads with the NYTimes when the paper of record sought to reveal his identity (he previously wrote under a pseudonym) as part of what they claimed was a public-interest story. While his latest post focuses on the question of the individual’s right to privacy vs. the public’s right to know about public figures, my question is slightly angular: what determines whether someone is a public figure?
One can give a quantitative answer and avoid philosophizing too much. E.g., anyone with 10,000+ social media followers. But that doesn’t seem quite right.
Hannah Arendt foresaw in her masterpiece The Human Condition that the rise of the social realm (and of social media) would de-privatize the private sphere while de-publicizing the public realm. The result is that we live in an ambiguous world that is neither public nor private and yet both. This ambiguity, whether we like it or not, seems to be our reality. It is not weird to Google someone before meeting them. Web presence generally constitutes something public in the sense that it is not hidden or intimate. On the other hand, it is not quite public either, given its casualness and the ubiquity. In a world where everyone is a minor celebrity, none are.
To answer what makes a public figure a public figure we’d first need to define what public and private are—and where we draw the line between them.
Where do you draw this line? If public figures are “fair game” for all kinds of public shaming and critique and scrutiny that private citizens are not, how do we know decide who is and isn’t a public figure? Remember that what one person calls “transparency” another calls “invasion.”
Do you expect your views on this question to align more generally with whether or not you favor “privatization”? Or is the case of the personal privacy of public figures a case unto itself?
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