I don't just think, but I know that Steem has more freedom of speech that most media outthere. I once had cops in front of my house, because we were talking about our politics and who may be responsible for what...on facebook. And I had to lie to the cop on the station that we were just joking around.
Steem as a whole system, has many apps , dapps....and some of them do not let anyone to downvote posts of other person. So if anyone sees the problem with this small function, just use other app/dapp. I personally don't have any problems on Steemit. But I'm seeing that some bots are
censoring posts from members who are just posting nonsense.
It happened to one of my friend who was just making photos in one software and than posted them for a year, and he was also upvoted by his friend with 15k sp... you see the picture.... I told him just to make another account and send steem there. Another one was dadjokeoftheday. Really nothing spectacular. Just one short (not so funny joke) per day. And pretty high upvotes . Posts were made months ahead...
But what I want to say is that...I really doubt that good posts will be flagged/banned. But if you want to post low quality, you still have some dapps on steem without downvoting/flagging function.
As I already said sometime before, people want all the goodies in one day. This is just not possible. Blockchain system is more fragile, dynamic... You can also put your own ideas about how to make Steem better (maybe say that we should abandon downvoting and flagging on steemit)...or even help with programming, translating.... be active.