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Nope but they have reputation and power from their upvotes so the whales decided that they matter not sure if they are also witnesses but if so they can delegate to an extent. (Kind of like a wikipedia mod) Power 75 on Steemit so 1 of 6 people lol.

https://steemit.com/steemcleaners/@steemcleaners/announcing-steemcleaners-the-steemit-abuse-fighting-team
https://steemit.com/witness-category/@anyx/anyx-cheetah-and-steemcleaners-witness-update-2017-06-14

(Data on rep breakdown)
https://steemit.com/steemit/@cryptoriddler/distribution-of-reputation-levels-verteilung-der-reputationslevel
Or
https://steemwhales.com/

That said you can still be a popular b**** even at negative rep lol Bernie
https://steemit.com/danthecuck/@berniesanders/dan-you-re-a-little-bitch

Decentralized in that you can ignore them but they can be harassing or get stronger and then be able to battle them on the same field. You can still make money though all they can do is downvote the post essentially and lower rep over time. You still get paid though basically avoids suing steem for copyright lol.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@anonymint/easily-help-steemit-avoid-copyright-liability

(Even if the copyright claims are invalid, Steemit could in theory possibly become inundated with DMCA requests, forcing them to censor the display of some content even though the content would still be accessible on the Steem blockchain. )

The Steemit Inc. corporation has the ownership of at least 59 million of the Steem money supply which is to be used for awarding STEEM POWER to millions of free signups. If this money was lost to lawsuits, it hypothetically could impact on the plan for driving huge adoption of Steem.

It's a balance between anarchy spam bots and content I guess, its basically the tyranny exists in one form or another for facebook its the content curators who decide left content only and reduce the views on right wing stuff. On twitter its censoring and deleting everyone who is against their views. On youtube and google search it's removing views of content that is not in their favor see Las Vegas Shootings. On steemit it's avoid triggering the whales but even if you do they don't bug you much unless you troll them or (cough are feminists) and don't like your ahem gentlemanly posts of beautiful asian women but would upvote and boost gentlemanly asian men ;P But essentially they cannot delete your account so you can go full Bernie and still get paid as the Opposition :) Or Unite a large enough faction to counter their's (oh look I created facism and communism antifa and Nazis and Republicans Vs Democrats) Middle is peace but always going to have the power users and hunger to control it in one small way or another like the office got to find a place for the Psychopaths of the world to wield the torch. ( https://steemit.com/abuse/@steemit.abuse/whale-upvote-abuse-whales-you-ve-got-1-hour-to-downvote#@alktoni/re-berniesanders-re-steemitabuse-whale-upvote-abuse-whales-you-ve-got-1-hour-to-downvote-20171013t090201399z)

Magic Building up rep for @randowhale supporters!
Lol it seems to work

Unifed Bot army decided to add you to the deathlist basically it's a bot after it adds you to the list someone manually inputs you in basically.
https://steemd.com/@vipclub

meanpeoplesuck downvote @vipclub/introducing-chen-si-qi-from-china (-16.66%) 12 hours ago
meanpeoplesuck downvote @vipclub/introducing-wang-yu-chun (-16.66%) 14 hours ago
https://steemd.com/model/@vipclub/introducing-chen-si-qi-from-china
blacklist-a downvote @vipclub/introducing-chen-si-qi-from-china (-10%) 19 hours ago
steemcleaners downvote @vipclub/introducing-chen-si-qi-from-china (-35%) 19 hours ago
(The one that matters most power and was manually done)

9a9cf6e1Steemcleaners steemcleaners downvote @vipclub/introducing-wang-yu-chun (-15%) 19 hours ago
9f878cbfSteemcleaners steemcleaners un-vote @vipclub/introducing-wang-yu-chun 19 hours ago
02fc57c0Steemcleaners steemcleaners downvote @vipclub/introducing-wang-yu-chun (-1%)

(With images the bot crawled and found it using its source which differs from your cited source so ya ...)
https://steemd.com/model/@vipclub/introducing-wang-yu-chun