Unfortunately steemit is not immune to censorship. Someone with enough clout can entirely shut down someone's account, killing their reputation and earnings.
That's got to change/be fixed. If authors have no protection or recourse from having their accounts attacked, they're not going to stay on steemit, and no mass adoption will happen.
I saw that happen once to an author (@kerriknox) debunking flat earth nonsense. Despite help from others, a whale took her from a rep of 60 something to negative numbers (a 1 last I saw) and her earnings of over $100/post to like $20 or something.
Ouch.