source: deviantart.
Anyways. If the signature of the this type of abuse is the amount of upvotes, it should be fairly easy to write a bot to identify potential abusers. Many third party steem services already count the number of upvotes, so i'll leave t to them to reuse/reorganize their code rather than reinvent the wheel.
However that said, if a hoard of bots is all that it takes to shut down a user. Then someone could use bots to mass upvote legit speakers, particularly those who speak about certain contraversial topics, just for the purpose of administratively shutting them down.
If such abuses continue. The system will likely have to be changed to a maximum of the top n upvotes, or a percentage (perhaps declining as the number of votes increase) past n.
meep