So in other words, if you're willing to pay enough for enough accounts, or organise groups, you'll be able to heavily suppress your political opponents or competitors tweets.
It’s an interesting exercise: how many accounts would, say, China need to suppress a critical story and what fraction of their intelligence budget would that constitute? This seems like a very cheap way to shape the public narrative since you’re only talking $8/month for many, many votes.
If it’s like HN or Reddit then speed of burying is more important than volume. A few downvotes early on can easily bury dissenting comments / posts or change the narrative significantly.
I wonder if an account will be allowed to unmute/unblock an account, in order to downvote (block) it again in later posts. Otherwise you're looking at using a lot of blue checks to silence articles from say, NYT.
Millions of accounts on “private” at $8/mo each
The question of thresholds is interesting: if it required a large number of votes it wouldn’t be very effective. If it doesn’t, it’s too easy to game — and even a million accounts doesn’t seem like a high bar since it could easily be rented for many votes. A large ad agency or PR firm could do that - promising all of their clients the ability to bury bad news (thinking of how much Johnny Depp alone paid) – and it’d be really easy to imagine, say, the Catholic or Mormon churches, Scientology, etc. recruiting members or even funding their Twitter Blue memberships.
That is only true for a message with high initial momentum (impact, importance,...). If you act as a decelerator/gatekeeper - in contrast to Russia's agents acting as accelerators -, then you can control a lot of things.
If you look at reddit, it seems like the combination of maybe 50 people with 10 sock-puppets each is enough to shape conversations on specfic topic, especially if there is also some organic support for an issue. There are some really obvious examples for this, like the defense of Monsanto's practices (until they were bought out by Bayer) or the extreme condemnation of Julian Assange and wikileaks (since they fucked over the Democrats in 2016).