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Abstract

Public figures are subject to higher rates of online abuse than other users in part because many digital platforms have significantly higher thresholds for intervening in cases of public figure abuse. Internationally, this higher rate of abuse has led to substantial impacts on public figures’ wellbeing and withdrawal from public life. This article presents findings from a study of platform policies to understand how platforms and policy stakeholders define public figures. Key findings included (a) public figures are ill-defined in platform policies, (b) policies often collapse distinctions between traditional public figures such as politicians and entertainers, emerging public figures such as influencers, and involuntary public figures such as a celebrity's family members; and (c) policies fail to acknowledge the diverse resources and institutional support enjoyed by different types of public figure. The article draws on applied cultural theory to unpack the challenges and consequences of inadequately defining public figures.

Keywords

online abuse public figures harassment trolling platform policy

Introduction

Public figures are subject to high rates of online abuse and harassment. They are often at greater risk of abuse than everyday private individuals due to professional requirements to be engaged digital users with regular exposure. The impacts of online abuse on public figures have been substantial and varied, including negative career and wellbeing outcomes—particularly among public figures who are women and minorities—and a negative impact on communities when the digital ecology is toxified by abuse and hate speech.

Public figures are victimised at higher rates than other users online (Ouvrein et al., 2021; Rossingh, 2017; Sarikakis et al. 2023) in part because many digital platforms have significantly higher thresholds for addressing online abuse against public figures in contrast to ‘everyday users’, primarily on the basis that content about public figures is deemed a matter of ‘public interest’ in platform terms of service and community guidelines. Between the differential threshold for addressing abusive content/behaviour and the greater likelihood of attracting abuse and hate speech online, public figures are increasingly withdrawing from public life and civic participation (Mannevuo, 2023), including particularly politicians, journalists, celebrities and sportsplayers. This is due to the lack of resources and support for gaining platform or legal intervention, as well as the substantial negative impact on health and wellbeing. In several cases, online abuse of public figures has resulted in suicide (Park and Kim, 2021; Thompson and Cover, 2022), indicating the severity and urgency of the issue. Although online abuse takes multiple forms, it is commonly understood as an umbrella term to describe threatening, humiliating, defamatory or offensive communication occurring on digital settings, including platforms (Bailey et al., 2021).

To date, there has only been nascent scholarship on the experiences and impacts of online abuse against public figures, despite growing public and governmental interest in the topic, including some official inquiries into how to better protect public figures through regulation of platforms to enhance policy and moderation protections (e.g., UNESCO, 2021). As part of a wider, commissioned study on online abuse against public figures, we analysed a selection of platform terms of service and related policies to understand how platforms and policy stakeholders define public figures. A key finding of our study was that public figures are ill-defined by platform policy, regulators and in public debate, such that: (1) policies provide fewer protections to public figures; (2) these policies often ‘lump together’ all people who are known to the public, regardless of career, notoriety or personal choice, and sometime can include family members of celebrities and politicians; (3) all platform policies fails to account for the difference in institutional support between those in established public roles (e.g., politicians, fully-employed journalists), emerging public figures who may be working alone (e.g., community advocates, junior sportsplayers, online influencers) and involuntary public figures (e.g., family members of politicians, or those who gained public attention through pursuing legal action in the courts or against a known person).

In this paper, we draw on applied cultural theory to unpack the challenges of defining public figures and the consequences that arise when digital platforms apply different thresholds of protection from online harm and abuse. We begin with a brief discussion of the current literature on the experience of online abuse by public figures before then presenting a framework for determining different categories of public figures beyond career areas. We then present some exemplary findings from our survey of the terms of service and community guidelines of 28 of the most popular platforms to provide indications of the shortcomings in platform definitions of public figures. We end with some remarks on how philosophical and ethical approaches to what constitutes a public figure might foster a more nuanced categorisation to help platforms and policy-makers recognise the diversity of risk, impact and harm to public figures from online abuse in the 2020s.

Public figures, online abuse and impacts

A nascent but growing field of scholarship, policy and literature shows that public figures are subject to high rates of online abuse and suffer substantial negative impacts across career, health and wellbeing. Online abuse of public figures can be conceptualised as falling broadly into two categories of problematic communication: misrepresentation (such as disinformation and misleading content); and directly-targeted abuse (including trolling, doxing, harassment and shaming pile-ons). Both categories often fall short of the definitions of illegal or unlawful content recognised in various legal jurisdictions under hate speech and anti-discrimination laws, particularly where a pile-on can involve relatively mild shaming that is not hate speech but can occur in such high rates that it results in serious harm (Thompson and Cover, 2022).

Public figures are at risk of online abuse through high-profile exposure and the potential virality of their posts, particularly given their use of digital platforms for promotion of themselves or the content in which they appear (television, music, films, party policy announcements, journalism alerts or breaking news). Most often targeted in this category are women and minorities (Ghaffari, 2022), as well as civil society advocates and activists, particularly in relation to polarising topics such as anti-racist advocacy (Park, 2017), family violence campaigns (Whiting et al., 2019), climate change activism (Duvall, 2023), and pro-vaccination messaging (Pérez-Arredondo and Graells-Garrido, 2021).

Addressing the high rates and extent of online abuse targeting public figures is politically and socially important, given the known negative impacts on public figures. Negative impacts can be understood across three categories: victim-survivor health and wellbeing; withdrawal from public life; and impacts on the quality of public discourse. In the case of the first, substantial literature has demonstrated that public figures have been found to suffer serious personal health and wellbeing harms resulting from protracted online abuse and harassment (Deavours et al., 2023; eSafety Commissioner, 2023). Frequent and severe online abuse has been found to require unhealthy levels of emotional labour to maintain employment and public presence (Miller and Lewis, 2022), with empirical studies finding that the online victimisation of some kinds of public figures such as sportsplayers and entertainers can result in more serious issues such as depression and problematic alcohol or drug use (Ouvrein et al., 2021) or suicidality in extreme cases (Jane, 2015; Thompson and Cover, 2022). Secondly, several studies have noted that online abuse substantially reduces the willingness and desire to remain engaged in public life, with some public figures known to change their field of employment as a result (Lee and Kim, 2022; Sarikakis et al., 2023). Online abuse is increasingly recognised as a future barrier to women's participation in public roles, civic responsibilities and elite sports in the United Kingdom, Sweden and Finland (Erikson et al., 2021; Harmer and Southern, 2021; Kavanagh and Jones, 2016; Mannevuo, 2023). Finally, the abuse of public figures is also seen as stifling the quality of public debate by making it more difficult for opinion-makers and debate leaders to participate safely in online discourse (Karatas and Saka, 2017; Pain and Chen, 2019).

Given the known extent and rate of online abuse experienced by public figures, and the substantial evidence of its negative impact on both the people themselves and the wider digital ecology, it is important to move beyond the idea that public figures, broadly speaking, are negatively affected by abuse, and instead begin to recognise that different ‘kinds’ of public figures are supported diversely by employers, organisations, regulators, management agencies, bystanders (Lu and Luqiu, 2023), platform moderators and others. As supportive environments can be an important factor in the capacity to withstand online abuse, particularly when digital platforms fail to protect all users equally, it is important to develop an understanding of how public figures are defined in contemporary culture and by platforms in order to inform future policy and intervention initiatives.

Contemporary categories of public figures: diversity of risk, impacts and support

Although there has been growing attention to online abuse against public figures within the scholarly literature, to date there has been insufficient investigation as to how platforms define public figures and hence support public figures in their policies. Definitions are imprecise in contemporary digital culture because the cultural framework of who ‘counts’ as a public figure has shifted substantially over the past twenty years. One aspect of the difficulty in the context of the United States has been the cultural tendency to treat all public figures, including celebrities and those unwittingly caught up in public interest issues, in the same way as ‘public officials’. This was the result of a 1964 US Supreme Court ruling (New York Times Co. v. Sullivan). The Supreme Court found that Montgomery Alabama police commissioner LB Sullivan was limited in his capacity to sue for defamation by virtue of his public, official role; the Court perceived the US Constitution's First Amendment as protecting freedom of expression in relation to ‘public questions’ and ‘public institutions’ (Chemerinsky, 2019). At the same time, a long-standing news culture tradition makes public officials the subject of media scrutiny on the basis of a combination of media perceptions of a ‘fourth estate’, ‘watchdog’ model of journalism (Hartley, 2009: 152) and a perception that such scrutiny of a public official—including of their non-public lives—meets the criteria for ‘newsworthiness’ (Bednarek and Caple, 2017). In a Web 2.0 framework, this capacity to write about and comment on public figures extended to bloggers and everyday users, albeit in ways which are now emerging as misrepresentation and abuse in an increasingly hostile digital ecology (Cover, 2022).

However, the concept of public figure as used by digital platforms, we discuss below, is not limited to political or government offices, but also includes those whose lives, opinions, attitudes or personal stories have become public as a result of being widely known, where their work requires them to engage the public regularly (such as journalists, entertainers and sports players) or where they have become known to the public through other means (victims of crime, people pursuing high profile legal action or against an existing public figure, family members of public officials, and so on). The extent to which it is ethical that all people known to the public be subject to a differential threshold for protection and intervention by platforms and/or regulators in the same way as public officials is questionable, particularly given that not all public figures have made a choice to be known to the public, and not all who do are equipped with the support and resources to deal with the consequences of online abuse.

For the purposes of this study, and to demonstrate the diverse range of public figures and the institutional or personal support they may have, we divide public figures into three categories or types: traditional; emergent; and future or involuntary (including cognate and family members of public figures).

Traditional public figures

Traditional public figures are those described in literature and public sphere debate in roles that were considered public prior to the advent of Web 2.0 social media in the early 2000s. Most prominent and obvious among these are politicians, those in public office or official roles such as senior government officers, elected officials serving a government, cabinet or ministry, a person elected to a parliament or legislature, or a person who is seeking to be elected to a government or legislature, per the description given of public figure given by the US Supreme Court in 1964. This category also often includes high-profile persons who have been in a government or legislature but have now resigned or retired, people who are active in party politics, or people who are appointed to supranational organisations, such as the United Nations or the World Health Organization, as well as business leaders of powerful transnational corporations. In the digital era, they are often open to criticism by online users and regularly challenged not for their partisan support or support for financial systems but in relation to perceptions of their personal lives in ways which follow norms established decades earlier by tabloid media (Glynn, 2000; Philo, 1995). Among this group, however, online abuse is often justified as a form of scrutiny of those in public office, or as a mechanism for the transfer and equalisation of power of those who are in institutional power positions versus everyday citizens who are relatively disempowered (Cover, 2004; Gauthier, 2002). Online abuse has resulted in a substantial number of women and minority public officials leaving office (Erikson et al., 2021; Gorrell et al., 2020; Harmer and Southern, 2021). However, most public officials, politicians and senior government officers have access to media units that can assist in take-downs of online abuse including disinformation, and administrative institutions are typically in a stronger position to utilise legal remedies to prevent abuse or directly contact a platform to intervene.

Distinct from public officials but traditionally recognised as public figures are journalists, including anyone who is active in researching, writing or reporting on public events or corresponding to news organisations. Journalists are among the most targeted public figures for online abuse, but because they are treated as public figures, they are often subject to a higher threshold for protection or intervention by platforms in cases of reported abuse (Posetti and Shabbir, 2022). The negative mental health and wellbeing impact of online abuse on journalists is well-recognised (Deavours et al., 2023; Obermaier et al., 2018), with many leaving the profession as a result (Lee and Park, 2023; Sarikakis et al., 2023). Additionally, employers of journalists—particularly newspapers and broadcast services—have been known to be unsupportive, leaving journalists to self-manage the risks and impacts of online abuse (Nechushtai, 2023). Not all journalists—whether high-profile or emerging—are employed regularly within an organisation, so the support to withstand or combat online abuse may be even further reduced for some (Das, 2007). One high-profile Australian case, that of journalist Stan Grant who was subject to substantial online racist hate speech, revealed a systematic lack of resources within news organisations to support or protect journalists from online abuse, despite the requirement to engage the public through digital platforms (Faruqi et al., 2023).

Contemporary cultural formations of public recognition also consider among the group of traditional public figures those who have become ‘celebrities’ by virtue of their work in acting, singing, entertainment or modelling. They differ from both journalists and politicians in the sense that they do not necessarily serve a public function outside entertainment, with most achieving notoriety or fame in relation to their appearance, activities or cultural contribution. Again, there is significant evidence that they are subject to high rates of online abuse, particularly given their use of digital platforms for promotion of themselves or the content in which they appear, with women and minorities more often victimised (Ghaffari, 2022). There is also some indication of a growing culture of ‘celebrity bashing’ in some countries, such as South Korea (Park and Kim, 2021). As with other traditional public figures, celebrities comprise a diverse group who enjoy institutional support at substantially variable rates and forms, whether that is relying on the resources to enable intervention, protection and support from management agencies, film and entertainment companies or bystanders (Jhaver et al., 2018).

Sportsplayers and athletes also comprise a traditional form of public figure, and have done so since at least the nineteenth century (Clanton, 2007). Sportsplayers tend to become public figures due to the public interest in their sport, although the extent to which they gain personal celebrity depends on career stage, sporting achievement and public appeal sometimes unrelated to the sport (Rojek, 2006). Some sportsplayers are expected by their organisations, clubs or the community to participate in public life in other ways, including political commentary, health promotion and civic advocacy, at times exposing them to online abuse when topics are polarised such as on health and fitness, religion and politics. Several studies have indicated that sportsplayers, as well as those involved in sports reporting and advocacy, are subject to high rates of online abuse (Antunovic, 2019; Blanco et al., 2022). Kavanagh and Jones (2016) found that elite athletes often find themselves socially isolated when dealing with online abuse and typically resort to unhealthy self-coping mechanisms. Again, the extent of support they enjoy as public figures varies: some sportsplayers and athletes may be supported by a club, organisation or sports federation, whereas others are entirely unsupported.

Finally, the traditional category of public figures includes those who have achieved celebrity in ways not aligned with any work, public office or cultural contribution. Since the early twentieth-century, this includes those who have achieved fame or notoriety in a variety of ways, such as those who have become known solely through participation in talkback shows (Creed, 2003), those whose personal stories have fuelled public interest to the extent that their lives became newsworthy (Furedi, 2010), and those whose opinions are held in regard, despite those opinions not being backed by expertise or experience (Kurzman et al., 2007). For Couldry (2003), these are ordinary, everyday citizens who have gained access to mass media's formations of representation such that their everydayness becomes part of the media world. Unsurprisingly, some are subject to online abuse and their presence in the digital sphere can be polarising.

Emergent public figures

The second category of public figures refers primarily to those that emerged in the twenty-first century, building on the extant ‘celebrity culture’ formation (Furedi, 2010) but drawing the pool of public figures primarily from new media genres such as Reality TV contestants and digital cultures. Most prominent among this group are influencers. Influencers are people who have attained ‘microcelebrity’ status (or greater) in digital media by having reached a threshold ‘following’ on blogs, social media and other platforms through the textual and visual narration of their personal lives and lifestyles (Senft, 2013). Their active engagement with their followers is typically monetised by integrating ‘advertorials’ into their content as third-party actors on behalf of companies selling travel, consumer goods, home renovations and other goods and services, and they often make paid physical appearances at guest events on behalf of multiple companies (Abidin, 2018). As their engagement model frequently involves generating a taste-based following, influencers are often at risk of online hostility from users who disagree with their tastes, values or attitudes, or who follow rival influencers. As an emergent form of public figure pertaining to the post-2010s digital era (Pintak et al., 2022), they are often subject to the same kinds of abuse applied to traditional public figures, but may be even less well supported, given many undertake their work alone, or retain management agencies that are responsible for their promotion but not necessarily contracted to work with platforms to intervene in cases of online abuse or harm (Cover et al., 2023).

Also in the category of emergent public figures are reality TV stars. Reality TV emerged in the late 1990s as a new form of participatory visual entertainment, providing opportunities for a wide array of everyday private citizens to become public figures through participation in television programs. Reality television is often recognised in media scholarship as prone to polarised views and emotional audience responses (Hill, 2005), resulting in online debate about participants, some of whom are subject to online abuse. There have been cases of reality TV stars who have died by suicide subsequent to high rates of online abuse (Murakami and Park, 2020), indicating the unpreparedness of many to be treated as public figures by platforms and other media. As with influencers, there is substantial variation in the extent to which they have institutional resources for legal intervention with platforms where abuse may be occurring, or for wellbeing support.

Thirdly, community activists and civil society advocates—including persons working in high-profile charities—are increasingly seen as a new form of public figure and an important component of public sphere debate due to their role in raising and sustaining important issues or topics (Regehr and Ringrose, 2018), although the origins of some of the recognisable forms of activism can be dated back to the early twentieth-century suffragette movement (Kristeva, 2004). Community activists and civil society advocates are recognised as being frequently exposed to direct forms of online abuse, including trolling, doxing and harassment, often in relation to anti-racist advocacy (Park, 2017), campaigns to highlight the issue of family violence (Whiting et al., 2019), climate change activism, pro-choice perspectives on abortion and pro-vaccination messaging (Bulut and Yörük, 2017; Jung et al., 2020). While there are many high-profile community advocates who are subject to online abuse, such as climate change activist Greta Thunberg (Duvall, 2023), the fact that most civil society actors and activists are not celebrities per se but may be active in topics and hashtags about which there are polarised views, or have their posts or content amplified or shared by better-known celebrities, means they are regularly subject to the same higher threshold for platform intervention in contrast to everyday users, but are likely to have fewer personal resources to remedy abuse or harmful misrepresentation (Jung et al., 2020).

Involuntary celebrity, cognate and future public figures

One key consideration of our approach to the online abuse of public figures, albeit one rarely raised in literature or public debate, involves the need to account for everyday users who are on the cusp of becoming public figures, whether intentionally or unwittingly, and may not have the personal resilience or institutional resources to deal with the impact of abuse or seek remedy through legal, regulatory or platform intervention means. This may include students and interns in areas such as journalism that are subject to high rates of online abuse, but for which there is little curriculum to ensure preparedness (Heckman et al., 2022).

There are also several well-known cases of persons who have unwittingly become public figures by virtue of an action or communication, and who have subsequently become the subject of online abuse (Thompson and Cover, 2022). In Australia, for example, parliamentary staffer Brittany Higgins alleged in 2019 that she was raped in Parliament House, Canberra by a fellow member of staff and pursued legal actions with an inquiry into the case (Osborne, 2021). While the story, case and inquiry remain controversial, Higgins—who had not necessarily consciously sought to become a public figure—noted 2 years after the case that she had been subject to “relentless online abuse,” primarily on Twitter (Women's Agenda, 2023). Indeed, several people have become public figures solely as a result of being victimised or harassed online (Jane, 2018), thereby reducing the protections afforded to them by platforms on the basis that they had become newsworthy or a matter of public interest.

Finally, this category might include involuntary public figures who have gained public attention due to cognate relationships with public figures. This applies particularly to family members of politicians, sportsplayers, celebrities and some emergent public figures who may at times be at risk of online abuse (Rossingh, 2017). A pervasive and longer-standing tabloid culture has considered them ‘fair game’ (Glynn, 2000) and this has arguably resulted in a digital ecology in which the misrepresentation, abuse and trolling of family members of public figures is seen as permissible (Posetti and Shabbir, 2022). The combination of association with a public figure and the attention that the abuse causes them can result in platforms identifying them as public figures themselves, and therefore subject to a higher threshold of protection. Some may of course pursue careers or activities in public life, while others may be subject to tabloid and public interest resulting only from their relationship to a public figure.

Platform definitions of public figures

To date, there have been no formal studies of digital platforms’ differential threshold for public figures, how they define public figures or whether their policies can accommodate the kind of categorisation we have offered above in order to determine patterns of risk, impact, support or for moderators to determine what and when intervention may be necessary. To provide a nascent analysis, we reviewed the terms of service and community guidelines of 28 of the most popular digital platforms. The sample platforms were chosen for their popularity among both adults and young people, based on a list of the 28 most popular platforms by user number provided in 2022 by Semrush (Lyons 2022), with user numbers ranging from 45 million (Tieba) to 2.9 billion (Facebook) monthly active users for the first quarter of 2022. We deployed cultural theory as a mechanism to analyse platform documentation in order to reveal the underlying discourses (Mills, 1997) and thematic inferences that help tease out the implications, significations and policy practices (Hartley, 2009) to emplace the inquiry within the wider sphere of digital cultures (Cover et al., 2023).

The analysis revealed that most platforms differentiate between everyday users and public figures, excluding those they defined as public figures from some of the protections offered to other users. Indeed, only 25% of the platforms reviewed protected public figures in the same way as other users, with the majority distinguishing public figures with a differential threshold for intervention, moderation or take-downs of abusive content. For example, Meta (Facebook and Instagram) notes in its Bullying and Harassment Policy that public figures are distinguished from private individuals “because we want to allow discussion, which often includes critical commentary of people who are featured in the news or who have a large public audience.” Meta notes that their platforms will “remove attacks that are severe” but will not include the abuse directed towards private individuals such as “content that's meant to degrade or shame” (Facebook, 2023a).

Notable in our review of the documents is that while many of the platform policies do offer definitions of public figures, none are nuanced to the point of being able to distinguish them on basis of risk, impact or expectations of institutional support or personal resources. Facebook and Instagram (Meta), for example, define a public figure as: “state- and national-level government officials, political candidates for those offices, people with over one million fans or followers on social media and people who receive substantial news coverage” (Facebook 2023b). Meta's definition does not specify if it includes those who receive “substantial news coverage” but have not explicitly sought to become public figures, such as family members of politicians or those who fall into our emergent category above.

‘X’ (formerly known as Twitter) (2023a) provides a definition of public figure in its curation style guide as follows:

We also need to consider the difference between public and private individuals. Public individuals are those who voluntarily choose to live in the public space, through activities such as running for public office, performing in the arts or competing in pro sports. This does not include people whose photos or videos go viral.

In this context, X defines public figures as persons who have made a deliberate choice to be public and thereby be exempt from certain protections. However, X does protect individuals who have unwittingly become public figures if that occurred through viral social media sharing. Here, there is a distinction made between our traditional and emergent categories on the one hand, and future or involuntary public figures on the other. X does not, however, protect from harms or privacy breaches those who have become public figures through being cited in news reports (Twitter, 2023b). Indeed, X's definition of public figure hinges primarily on the extent to which that person is in “the public consciousness” (Twitter, 2023b). X's approach is to consider whether a “public interest” has been met only at the time of moderation or intervention (Twitter, 2023c) rather than to restrict the content in the first instance, and does not provide a definition of public interest beyond that other users may be paying attention to stories about that individual. In this context, an unwitting or reluctant public figure may be exposed to online abuse without recourse to take-down or moderation.

TikTok defines public figures explicitly as people who have “a significant public role, such as a government official, politician, business leader, and celebrity” (TikTok, 2023). As with Meta, it collapses a number of the traditional and possibly emergent types of public figure without regard for distinctions between those who have sought public office and those who are celebrities by virtue of, for instance, being a contestant in a Reality TV programme. As with Meta and X, TikTok likewise does not provide a definition of public figure attentive to experience, support of institutional protection and resourcing. However, TikTok is one of the few platforms to explicitly exclude persons under 18 years of age from the definition of public figure (TikTok, 2023), although most other platforms have other policy protections for children and young adults who are minors.

Another example of a problematic definition is found in LinkedIn's “Harassment and abusive content” policy. LinkedIn defines public figures as “politicians, celebrities, prominent business leaders, or other individuals voluntarily in the public eye” (LinkedIn, 2023). Here, the platform provides some clear categories that would be understood as public figures by a reasonable person, but also includes “individuals voluntarily in the public eye” which may in some cases be more difficult to determine without clarificatory guidelines. For example, a person who filed a civil suit against a perpetrator of physical abuse or sexual harassment that occurred in a high-profile institution, such as a parliamentary office, may be considered to have made a voluntary decision for a case to be heard in a public setting in a way that may become newsworthy, but may not have been aware of the full implications of becoming ‘notorious’, and may be wholly unprepared for the repercussions of online abuse and harm that may follow that decision.

Although these are only a small number of examples of digital platform policies related to the online abuse of public figures and the differential threshold for protection of online figures, they are exemplary in their failure to provide nuanced, sophisticated definitions of public figure, or to use definitions to recognise the substantial diversity in risk, impact and support that may depend to some extent on the type of public figure, the extent to which they are traditional, emergent or involuntary public figures, or to recognise any possible alignment between the experience and age of adult public figures and their resilience or resources for self-support and wellbeing management in the face of sometimes extreme rates of online abuse.

Beyond public and private

It is now widely recognised that all users must navigate the concepts of public and private communication in ways that are complex, beyond mutually-exclusive dichotomies, and with nuance (Papacharissi, 2014). However, responsibility for facilitating a safe and non-harmful digital ecology also rests with platforms, meaning that platforms too must protect all users in the same way, likewise beyond public and private distinctions. Applying a higher threshold for intervention when public figures are abused (by misrepresentation, trolling or hate speech) on the pretext of public interest or generating debate is damaging to the wider digital ecology (Cover, 2022). Community expectations that online communication should be free from regulatory interference no matter how harmful on the basis of a United States approach to freedom of expression are diminishing in favour of a public mood for platform and state regulation of online communication (Flew, 2021), and legislators and regulators in some jurisdictions have expressed concern about platforms’ failure to protect public figures from online abuse on the basis of its negative impact on them personally or in relation to the toxification of the digital ecology (Commonwealth of Australia, 2022; eSafety Commissioner, 2023).

Although equitable platform protections for all users are desirable, our analysis of platform policies indicates that it is unlikely to be achieved by platform policy and regulation alone. Some major platforms have resisted enhancing protection for public figures on the basis that this may negatively impact their business model by reducing traffic and engagement on issues perceived to be of public interest (Candedub, 2019). Legislative approaches are perceived as having a lack of implementation capacity and ineffective if not developed in conjunction with substantial comprehensive, multi-stakeholder, long-term implementation approaches in an interjurisdictional setting (Vincent, 2017; Workneh, 2019). Indeed, although many of the calls for better regulatory intervention into protecting users from digital harms have come from cross-jurisdictional advocacy (e.g., Christchurch Call, 2019), a core difficulty in effective regulation and intervention practice involves three hurdles: (1) while governments can regulate for uses that affect their jurisdiction, intervening with smaller platforms that do not have an office or agency in that country is more difficult; (2) without effective legislation that requires disclosure of perpetrators, it may not be possible for a platform to reveal the location of a perpetrator in a third-party country, and (3) as has been seen in the regulation of general purpose artificial intelligence (GPAI), it can take many years to develop an international, binding treaty that establishes norms across multiple countries. With these regulatory constraints in mind, should the differential threshold for protecting public figures remain in place, platforms, legislators, regulators and the general public need to recognise the diversity of risk, impacts and access to personal or institutional resources for managing high rates of online abuse, victimisation and harm.

In addition to the more nuanced framework for categorising public figures through cultural practices of roles we offer above, a critical re-figuration of what it means to be a public figure may be a useful tool for policy-makers, legislators and platforms to drive enhanced regulation and shift platform cultures towards greater ethical practices in intervention and moderation. This is particularly salient, given that high-profile suicides of public figures or the large-scale withdrawal of women from public roles has not generated greater ethical intent towards their protection. Critically engaging with what it means to be a public figure begins with undoing the idea that the figure is wholly and exclusively ‘public’ by recognising first that there are aspects of all subjects that are private, and second that the distinction between public and private is blurred. This is important, given much of the abuse public figures receive relates not to their professional role or public communication but to aspects of their private lives, their families or their opinions unrelated to their public roles (Abidin, 2019). Aspects of feminist theory have long put the commonsense view of the public-private distinction in question, and some media ethics commentators have noted that the focus on private information about public figures is unethical. For example, Gauthier (2002) identified the ethical concerns of revealing or discussing private matters of citizens in public sphere discourse as failing a range of ethical frameworks, including Kantian ethics (on the basis that it denies the subject agency to decide what information about themselves is discussed or engaged with by others) and liberalism (a failure to weigh the benefits of abusing public figures against the substantial, recognised harms of online abuse). Gauthier however notes that a ‘power transfer’ model may allow for some discourse on private information about public officials (particularly politicians) on the basis that privacy affords a personal power inequitably enjoyed by everyday users (Gauthier, 2002: 26–27). In the context of online abuse of public figures, all three of these ethical frameworks preclude the abuse of public figures, alerting us to the fact that the impact of abuse affects their private lives: (i) by treating them as objects rather than subject-participants in the public sphere with personal relationships, families and un-aired attitudes; (ii) on the basis that the harm of abuse to a liberal-humanist subject is a greater social concern than the generation of profit through malicious and uncivil online traffic; or (iii) on the basis that abuse and misrepresentation that affects a subject privately are not the same as the revelation of private information and thereby do not transfer power to a wider populace, no matter how much that might feel the case in populist hate politics (Cover, 2020).

Indeed, at the core of the unethical positioning of the differential threshold for protecting public figures is the problematic fact that public figures are deemed entirely public in a way which subsumes their multifaceted subjectivity under this one aspect of their sociality—what Foucault (1990: 43) identified as de-subjectification: the viewing of one facet of identity as an “active principle” and “singular nature.” An alternative is, again, to draw on feminist theory to apprehend the very concept of public not as a singular nature but as a facet of complex social interdependency (Butler, 2020). Gal (2002) has identified the concept of public-ness as unstable spheres of activity of time, and suggested it can better be recognised through ‘fractal distinctions’ between public and private, whereby both terms are recalibrated to include private and public parts through ever narrower contexts. For example, no public figure's public life—including those in political or official roles—is fully made available for criticism or abuse, but involves private conversations. Likewise, private individuals and everyday users themselves have public aspects through sharing private opinions or life narratives online. When a public figure is made available by platform policy to higher rates or abuse, it is to ignore that within the public role—whether traditional, emergent or involuntary—there are private elements representing the same subjectivity as an everyday user, and thereby equally as harmful to them personally, as well as to the a priori interdependency of all subjects that grounds the contemporary digital communication ecology. In this context, to understand the harm of online abuse of a public figure is to recognise that the harm is directed towards them also in a private capacity—a reasoning that argues for equal protection against such harms by platform policy.

Conclusion

Public figures experience high rates of online abuse. Some are at greater risk than everyday individuals owing to their professional requirements to be engaged digital users and undertake online self-promotion. In addition to this greater risk is the widely-held perception that they are ‘fair game’ because they are public figures. This sentiment is reflected in the terms of service and community guidelines of most major digital platforms. In this study, we examined the policies on online abuse against public figures on 28 digital platforms. Our findings show that definitions of what and who counts as a public figure are unsophisticated and do not reflect the nuances among different categories (traditional, emergent and involuntary), nor in ways that are grounded in the differential risks, impacts and support resources enjoyed diversely by public figures. Given the risks of serious harm to individual public figures, including many cases of suicidality, and the harms to the quality of public discourse, there are reasonable grounds for regulatory and platform intervention that protects public figures in ways equitable to other users.

We have argued in this paper that there is an ethical imperative to apprehend public figures through more complex frameworks, whether that be a framework differentiated by roles, risks, impact and harms with which we began this argument, or through more complex philosophic approaches to digital ethics that recognise the multifaceted subjectivity of even the most public of public figures. Given the perceived resistance to protecting public figures (however defined) from the harms of misrepresentation and direct abuse, we have noted that greater attention to the definitions and categorisations of public figures is a valuable, albeit inadequate, stop-gap measure should equitable protections not be possible.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

This research was funded by the Commonwealth Government of Australia (Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts).

ORCID iDs

Rob Cover

Joscelyn Gleave

Thuc Bao Huynh

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Protecting public figures online: how do platforms and regulators define public figures?

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Public figures, online abuse and impacts

Contemporary categories of public figures: diversity of risk, impacts and support

Traditional public figures

Emergent public figures

Involuntary celebrity, cognate and future public figures

Platform definitions of public figures

Beyond public and private

Conclusion

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iDs

References