Question about LinkedIn and emails

My situation is that we are publishing a list of the top 25 UK figures in a specific technology. We would like to notify those figures that they've been chosen before we publish, but we have not been given their email addresses.

My questions are: If we are able to obtain those email addresses from the public domain (but haven't been given explicit consent from the people to use those email addresses), is it admissible to email them in order to ask them if they want to be featured? Does this fall under 'legitimate interest'?

Yes, it falls under legitimate interest. If you find the email in the public domain, the owner of the email expects to be contacted for something of interest. Not to receive commercials or spam, therefore informing those persons that they will feature on a list of top 25 UK figures can be considered a legitimate interest.

If we message these people on social media instead of emailing (i.e. LinkedIn and/or Twitter), but we are not currently 'connected' to them, is this admissible under GDPR?

Yes, the message is under the legitimate interest of the data controller.

Here you can find more information:

• Is consent needed? Six legal bases to process data according to GDPR: https://advisera.com/eugdpracademy/knowledgebase/is-consent-needed-six-legal-bases-to-process-data-according-to-gdpr/

If you want to know more about GDPR compliance you can consider enrolling in this EU GDPR Foundations Course: https://advisera.com/training/eu-gdpr-foundations-course//