[whiddershins]

I am not sure you are correct.

Libel has a pretty narrow definition and clearly leaves the realm of opinions and ideas to a different realm of willfully lying about someone with the intent to harm them personally.

The fact that we remove libel protections from public figures including politicians already makes this an extremely narrow subset of speech.

Arguing that this is just another example of an arbitrary line within a grey area seems like a rhetorical device to overemphasize the subjectivity of speech protections in pursuit of making them no longer able to be consistently protected.

[jakelazaroff]

But the point is, why is libel illegal at all? I can mislead someone in order to get someone to buy something from me, but if I lie about a person it's not okay? Why is reputational damage worse than monetary?

The fact that it's okay to libel a public figure (a fact I didn't know until now!) further underscores how arbitrary it is. At what level of renown are you a "public figure"? How is it measured?

We should be as stringent as possible in legal exceptions to freedom of speech. But there's no moral obligation to protect any given speech from social consequences (such as getting kicked from your web host). No one is actually a free speech absolutist.

[whiddershins]

Lying to someone to get them to buy something is in many if not most cases called fraud, and is illegal on those grounds.

This is where speech becomes a kind of action: misleading people in business, directing people to do harmful or illegal things. It’s actually pretty interesting how consistent the common thread is ... incitement to illegal acts or misrepresentation which results in tangible harm.

[zaarn]

Libel has different definitions in different cultures and can have fairly wide definitions.

[whiddershins]

To my knowledge few if any jurisdictions have as expansive a concept of free speech as the United States. From the standpoint of US law, other legal systems could be said to not have freedom of speech.

Therefore the United States libel definition is most directly relevant to the overall point here.