I think for most of us, it's not about content that is "controversial," especially since there is no reason for research, science, whistleblowers, and public data (the things being downvoted 100% by the person who upvoted this comment for $5) to be controversial.
The only reason people see it as controversial is because the corporations that run the media, FDA, CDC, WHO, etc have all spent BILLIONS and untold hours brainwashing people into believing obvious lies - even when they come clean months later, the average Joe Altleft is still going to rant and rave and live their life based on "news" that was false at the time, and is now admittedly false.
Ex: Masks, The jab, lockdowns, "too big to fail", WMDs in Iraq, the "Federal Reserve" (neither federal or a reserve bank), The Gulf of Tonkin, Tuskegee, DDT, and on and on and on.
If there are people on a platform attacking the visibility & earnings of those researching and bringing to light these most important issues to society, and the platform is designed for it and the witnesses don't want to change it - then we just have Facebook with 20 Zuckerbergs instead of one.
As you will see from our conversations below, this is one method amongst many options being worked on that should be employed. If the algorithm was made open source, many dapps could add a "community regulated / tweaked down voted" option on their trending page
This is definitely something we need. Or even a little GUI settings area (like peakd has for so many things) where someone can toggle their own algorithm. There's all sorts of adjustments and tweaks someone might want to make...
It used to be a huge selling point that Steem just had a "trending" page based purely on upvotes... but that time is long past (probably since 2016), and now the "algorithm" is basically just that a few whales decide what's trending for everyone.
Obviously people have their own "feed" - but it's hard to discover new content there, and you can't sort it except by timestamp. There's also communities and their feeds, but you end up with similar issues...
There should definitely be an open source trending algo which is customisable by each user directly on the platform. This can then be coded as an API and implemented into the front end user interfaces of any platform wishing to give their users the flexibility.
Maybe you can haveva go at publishing a blog with a detailed specification as to the requirements?