Perhaps you are not famiiar with steemd, a sort of blockexplorer you can use to learn about particular accounts. Upon investigating @abusereports with steemd, you will discover that the account is one of many 'sock puppets' owned by the same person that runs the @berniesanders account, whose witness account is @nextgencrypto. Many of the consensus witnesses vote for that witness, and both the last two accounts were amongst the original 'ninjaminers' who mined all the steem there is into existence prior to any app or platform, even Steemit.

He has hella stake, invented to bidbot with @randowhale (now defunct) and is notorious for exactly the kind of flagging you notice happening to @joe.public, whose truthful and indomitable nature makes him incapable of pandering, even to high staked users with huge influence on Steemit, Inc.

Not long ago, a flag war began between the @berniesanders group of accounts and @fulltimegeek, who bought his stake with fiat, and also had many bots. Still does, actually. However, the end result of that disagreement was the initiation of censorship by Stinc, who has blacklisted all of @fulltimegeek's accounts, and even votes cast by his accounts are mystery votes, as the voter is not revealed in the UI. Since many frontends like Steempeak use Steemit APIs, on those apps @fulltimegeek is also completely censored.

As always, the first censorship is just the beginning of the slide down to complete narrative control, and as the flagging/censorship has burgeoned on Steem, users have been leaving in droves, and folks hearing of it from others who've seen it, like your friends will, have not been coming.

We hear rhetoric from Stinc about mass onboarding, but the HF21 that is coming soon will halve author rewards, double curation rewards - which favors substantial stake (the ninjaminers, who still hold almost all Steem in existence) financially, semi-exponential rewards curve - again, favoring large stakeholders, and lastly the newly proposed downvote pool, which will provide 25% more flags to each account based on their extant VP, which derives from their stake.

You don't have to wonder much about what will happen to anyone that irritates substantial stakeholders, like @berniesanders. The market is prepricing in the coming hardfork, as markets do, and the price of Steem is plunging, market cap declining, and users are hemorrhaging. After the real catastrophe rears it's ugly head upon implementation of HF21, the real decline will begin, as the market reacts to the full consequences to the market for Steem of reducing the number of participants by an order of magnitude.

I have made every effort to reveal these facts as the features were discussed, and only recently did the incessant flags on my every post and comment stop, as I would neither stop saying what I believe, nor care about the trivial financial impact on my account - as I do not use Steem as money, but came here, as you mentioned, to take part in a censorship resistant, decentralized social platform.

It's being killed, and Bernie seems to be the heart of the strike team taking it down, for whatever reason. It doesn't really matter to me why, only that it's happening, and I'm hunting around the edges for a replacement. I may have found something in Blockchan, which secretes posts in the Ripple network, but that's only a couple days old, and very, very alpha at present (not even really in beta yet). We'll see how that goes. Zeronet has also recently been used to recreate of version of 8chan, which has been taken down by Cloudflare, an internet wide security provider the secures websites from ddos attacks, and without that protection websites aren't viable, since they are overwhelmed with incessant DDOSing. 08chan isn't really 8chan, according to the admins of the closed site, but many of the users have gone there, and the zeronet protocol stores all images in IPFS, and users themselves host the nodes, which makes it immune to DDOS, and not vulnerable to legacy internet censorship. It does not have a cryptocurrency feature, which reduces rapacious flaggotry, a good thing IMHO.

There seem to be no cryptocurrencies presently potential to resist the weighting of stake to seize the majority of the value of the tokens, and while many pay lip service to decentralization, as long as the stake is substantially centralized, the users subject to KYC, and government regulation and control, they are little more than new features of the legacy fiat financial structure, in which I am not interested.

Hope that information is useful to you in your search for free speech. it's an ever more scarce and rare delight in this world, and that makes it of great value indeed. If you find it, do please let me know as you are able.

Thanks!