There are two means of monitoring which accounts initiate a downvote from HELIOS. First of all, an automated comment is always generated on the downvoted post to notify the user from which account the downvote originated. Secondly, all downvote call originations can be monitored here: https://he.dtools.dev/@helios.dburn
Hive defender is a good concept however there are still way too many grey areas when it comes to proving or disproving ai abuse, calculating the threshold of abuse, proving the time it takes to find the abuse, coupled with moral hazard introduced once profiteering and issuing downvotes become intertwined.
We do have a working white list in effect that is "safe" from our downvoter. Our whitelist includes the top 20 Witnesses (and then some), HIVE whales, and many trending authors with a high reputation (generally over 60). We also have a whitelist appeal channel on our discord for users to apply to get on the whitelist.
Our downvoting service is open to all users except "bad actors" on the hivewatchers / spaminator blacklist. Blacklisted users can always be downvoted through our system, however, they can never issue a downvote themselves.
The system is available to anonymous accounts, however, once a user is found abusing our downvote tool they will be blacklisted from using it.
A downvote on a post that was doing nothing wrong and was just the target of malice will not be permitted, and simply be removed. In that case, the user who originated the downvote would lose the HELIOS they burnt to issue the downvote.
The downvote system is not going to turn into a business, HELIOS will never profit directly from a downvote. Users burn HELIOS tokens which they earn through various means, i.e. delegation.
If a user chooses to spend some of their HELIOS to flag a post they deem to be against the Terms and conditions of Hive then their reward is the feeling of satisfaction from making a difference while helping their fellow HELIOS stakeholders (by burning tokens), and helping the Hive community by reprimanding abuse while adding back to the reward pool.
Users might choose to delegate to pool their downvotes with ours to gain a bigger downvote, the extra 20% delegators earn in HELIOS is enough to offset the cost of some % of downvotes, so through delegation users essentially get to issue a certain amount of downvotes "for free" if that's their intent.
In addition, we do plan on issuing some liquid HELIOS & HIVE reward bonuses to users that prove themselves genuinely effective in using our downvoting tool. We currently set aside 5% of our curation rewards to a flag reward fund to share solely with our burn-to-downvote users.
Thanks for spending the time to ask these important questions. You're right that it's better for us to lay out all the facts early to avoid misunderstandings in the future.
Sounds very interesting! :)