This doesn't mean that we shouldn't draw lines between speech we're okay with and speech we're not. Literally every human being on the planet does it! This is why I don't like "marketplace of ideas" arguments: the person making them always always always still thinks some speech should be somehow punished in the market.
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.
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.
I've never met an actual free speech absolutist. I've just met people who tolerate certain forms of hate speech.
