I think it is less a matter of censoring (i.e. making "undesireable" information UNavailable), and more a matter of minimizing (i.e. making "undesireable" information less visible while still being available). I like your analogy about votes being market signals. Some market players have the ability to generate stronger signals than others. A whale has a much higher voting weight than the average steemer, even if that whale decides to scale down their vote by lowering the percentage. For example, my vote has a weight of 6,516, but Hive account@dantheman has a weight of 214,532,135 -- so only if Hive account@dantheman were to adjust his voting percent to 0.003% would my vote be worth the same as his.