Yes, this is a major problem. There's a lot of circle-jerking and basically a fear of speaking out on things you care about because of the flag system. I've seen flags used to 'hide' posts some don't agree with. It's censorship.
I got involved with a conversation between vegans where one suggested creating a bot to go around flagging anyone that used pictures of animal flesh like in recipes or just generally. Censorship rather than open discourse. That seems to be what some of them want. Sad really.
Iv been considering the possibility of starting anti censorship group, including bot armies and manual votes as well.
I would envision it as non partisan. Whether its vegan, carnivore, communist, fascist or whatever the content is, the group will post it on the page and people who want to support the project can manually use their votes to counter attacks or bring their bots in to help.
I really dont want to see censorship start to get really bad here. If this problem isnt taken care of, I could easily see it being worse here than on even the mainstream sites.
Its up to us as users to remain vigilant of freedom of speech on this platform. And that means protecting anyone who being silenced and unjustly denied their right to speak.